Comment 8 for bug 467997

I encountered this issue and found this bug searching for a solution. I have just upgraded from 8.10 "Intrepid" to 9.04 "Jaunty" then to 9.10 "Karmic". I didn't notice if this issue was present on Jaunty, but it definitely is on Karmic.

After a bunch of trial and error, I have a workaround of three short and simple commands:

sudo mv /usr/share/icons/Tangerine/icon-theme.cache /usr/share/icons/Tangerine/icon-theme.cache.1
sudo mv /usr/share/icons/Tangerine/32x32/places/start-here.png /usr/share/icons/Tangerine/32x32/places/start-here.png.1
killall gnome-panel

You might get a file not found error if the file icon-theme.cache doesn't exist, this is fine, but you probably won't. Sudo is only needed for the first two.

My testing consisted of copying everything from /usr/share/icons/Tangerine into another folder in /usr/share/icons, selecting that icon theme, then deleting the "*start-here*" files (as in find /usr/share/icons/Tangerine -iname "*start-here*") and running killall gnome-panel after each delete to see if it did anything. You can actually remove all of the "*start-here*" files and somehow still have those icons present in the "Menu Bar" ("A custom menu bar") applet but they'll not be in the "Main Menu" ("The main GNOME menu") applet; the only file that changes anything is the 32x32 png one. The issue is definitely around that file. If other themes are having this issue, perhaps this solution could work for them too.

Here's some info about my system:

$ apt-cache policy tangerine-icon-theme
tangerine-icon-theme:
  Installed: 0.27
  Candidate: 0.27
  Version table:
 *** 0.27 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.31-22-generic #60-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 27 00:22:23 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=karmic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.10"