Comment 1 for bug 250021

I have had a similar problem. While working in gksudo nautilus, all my icons became generic & the desktop became non-responsive. Upon reboot I was not able to login to my user--I have enabled root on my system & allowed admin logon--that was the only way I could get in my system. I found in my case that /tmp had permissions changed in a way that my user could not write to it--I changed permissions on /tmp & could use again.

I think that nautilus is changing permissions at various places in the system whilst using root.