Comment 50 for bug 72468

There appears to be several variations of the Trash problem, and it's very difficult to get any technical information which might be helpful . I would still like to know what code performs the test that decides which icon should be displayed, and it appears Gnome and Nautilus do so independent of each other.
After my initial installation I gathered and saved the output from a few commands one of which was "env", and now after resolving my problem I notice 2 environment variables have changed, although their initial values would not have led me to believe anything was wrong. You might check them first which you can do by typing "env" in a terminal.
The 2 values which have changed are DESKTOP_SESSION and GDMSESSION. Initially they displayed "default", which I assumed was "gnome" in Ubuntu and would be "KDE" in Kubuntu. Both are now displaying "gnome".
Good luck, and if I can provide any info that might help, just ask as I'll stay subscribed to this thread for a while to see if any additional light is shed on how the Trash icon works.