Comment 42 for bug 399974

As confirmed, this is still in Lucid as of 9th June.

I've worked around it by adding the following to my ~/.bashrc

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop-metadata/directory/icon_view_keep_align
ed --type string "false"

Not sure why it's a string rather than a boolean, but that's what gconf-editor said it was.