I am also having this problem in Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64.
I was editing the main menu using alacarte, and when I restarted the icons, selection and right click functionality have disappeared from the desktop. If I run "nautilus" these return, but disappear again on reboot. As a workaround I've added nautilus to the startup applications.
It would be great to get this fixed without a clean install!
I am also having this problem in Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64.
I was editing the main menu using alacarte, and when I restarted the icons, selection and right click functionality have disappeared from the desktop. If I run "nautilus" these return, but disappear again on reboot. As a workaround I've added nautilus to the startup applications.
It would be great to get this fixed without a clean install!