Nautilus bug (desktop refresh)?


My application creates some desktop files that it places in the $(HOME)/.gnome-desktop directory
for the purpose of displaying custom icons on the desktop. I had thought the mere presence or absence
of a file in this directory would be sufficient for it to be displayed on the desktop, and that's the way it
works in KDE (with the $(HOME)/Desktop directory). It also works this way in GNOME most of the
time, but not always. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't, like if I log out and back in, for instance.
There seems to be this concept of the desktop needing to be "refreshed" with CTRL-R. That does do the job.
When I click on the desktop with my mouse and then hit CTRL-R, the desktop is indeed refreshed with the
current contents of the directory described above. Is this a known Nautilus bug? I thought I read somewhere
that it was. FAM is running, so why does the desktop not always reflect the contents of that magic directory?
Even stranger, sometimes it seems that my application writes desktop files to the magic directory, but they don't
actually appear there until I do a CTRL-R. What's up with that?

So I guess my main question is ... what is happening when I do a CTRL-R? And is there a way I can do that
either from the command line in a terminal window or programmatically? I actually need to do the latter, and I
could do that if I knew how to do the desktop refresh from a command line.

Thanks,
Don


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