duplicate directories in /home

Using 11.04 Natty on a laptop, with classic view (not Unity).

I logged in to my account, only to be greeted by a "fresh looking" account. The desktop settings went back to default, sound scheme, etc.

At first I thought it's a file system error, or the /home encryption that went bad. But then I noticed the directories that begin with a capital letter (Desktop, Documents, Pictures...) are now duplicate (listed twice if I do "ls") and empty. Also, there's a slight pause after I enter my password, as if something is waiting or looking for something else.

Luckily, I keep most of those directories symlinked to Dropbox (they were symlinks to somewhere else before the problem occurred), so the content is not lost - except for Desktop, and I do have some files there I'd like to recover if possible.

The rest of my /home directory does not seem to be affected. The system seems normal otherwise.

What could have gone wrong, to cause reinitializing these account folders? I looked briefly through the logs but couldn't see anything obvious yet.

Any ideas how to recover the content in Desktop?

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/

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