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I'm not sure which update did it - but at some point recently something broke my Desktop. I now have a grey background (instead of the gradient colour I had before) and no Desktop icons. Right clicking on the Desktop doesn't produce a menu any more, either.

My theme, sounds etc all seem to have been forcibly changed as well.

Also, when I attempt to start Phpstorm, it hangs on the splashscreen, and console shows:

Error parsing gtk-icon-sizes string: ''

Anyone have a suggestion how I fix it, or even diagnose what the problem is?

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Log out of any graphical sessions, go to a text terminal (alt-ctrl-F1) then switch display managers with the following commands: sudo stop gdm then sudo start lightdm. – nerof61 Mar 10 at 17:23
Thanks nerof61 - unfortunately it made no difference. gdm wasn't running, and restarting lightdm had no effect. Any other ideas? – hippyjim Mar 10 at 18:08
You could try xfwm4 --replace and/or xfdesktop --reload and see if that helps, but your problem may need more than that to solve it. That error message usually appears if you have a broken theme installed, so there might be some errors in your gtk rc files if you are using custom themes or settings. Are there any clues in your .xsession-errors or .xsession-errors.old? – Mik Mar 10 at 19:33
Are you running Xfce 4.8 (stock version with Precise)? or a later version?, as there was a recent problem with xfdesktop in Xfce 4.10, for which a fix should be available very soon. – Mik Mar 10 at 23:37

1 Answer

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I had the same error. I tried to update xfce via ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12. But it has only installed some parts. Afterwards xfdesktop was missing.

In my case it just helped to reinstall xfdesktop:

sudo apt-get install xfdesktop4
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