Comment 9 for bug 880533

I have experienced this bug for some time in 12.04. And I can confirm still exists in the latest daily 14.04.

To reproduce the bug in daily 14.04:
1) Put a trash icon to one of the panels and enable the trash icon on the desktop.
2) Empty trash (all icons should indicate that the trash is now empty)
3) Create a dummy file and put it in the trash (All trash icons should indicate that something is in the trash)
4) Now, log off and log back in.
5) The Trash on the panel and in Thunar is showing 'empty' while the Trash on the desktop is showing full!

One way to resolve this problem is to put a dummy file in the trash and then immediately remove it. The status of the trash is the updated and all trash icons show the correct status.

A temporary workaround I have been using:

On startup, run fixtrash.sh:

#!/bin/sh
until pidof gvfsd-trash
do
  sleep 1
done
echo > ~/.local/share/Trash/files/fixtrash
rm ~/.local/share/Trash/files/fixtrash

Hope this helps.