Comment 4 for bug 504447

This still happened with 1.5.2, I didn't test 1.5.3 anymore as there were no changes to the metadata code. It is caused by corrupted metadata files. Deleting these fixes this issue for me. You can find them in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/ and some of it is stored in gconf, too - you can delete it using "gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/nautilus/desktop-metadata". Another thing I noticed is that the desktop-icon positions never seemed to be remembered, but maybe thats just because the daemon died and so nautilus couldn't get it.
I'm attaching a copy of the metadata before I removed the directory.