It appears my icon theme is busted. I've been using it like this since April (11.04) upgrade, although I can't remember exactly how I got into this predicament.
How can I reset the ubuntu icon theme? Which packages do I need to fix?
Thanks!
While searching through the this site, I found other people with similar problems. I first attributed it to gnome-settings-daemon not starting at the correct time, so I tried the fix listed here:
https://askubuntu.com/a/21901/37438
This did not fix the issue, but if I were to kill/relaunch gnome-settings-daemon
then i would get the gnome theme back.
A little more digging, and web searching led me to remove my .config/monitors.xml
file, due to a message on login that my monitors configuration was not being properly set.
I removed the xml file and everything works fine now. No more default gnome icons :D