I am totally new to Ubuntu and have recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 (64 bit) on my hp elitebook 8540w (installed it alongside win7 on it's own partition formatted in ext4). For the first few days, everything seemed to work just fine, but now, all of a sudden, the icons for the folders and files just disappeared (I would have liked to upload a screenshot to show it to you, but that isn't possible since I'm a new user.) Instead of the regular icons for devices, files or folders, they all have the same icon now which is a white/grey piece of paper, so you can't really tell anymore whether a certain entry you're looking at is a file or a folder.
I don't really know what other information might be useful concerning this issue, so I'm just posting this question without further info. Feel free to ask if you need to know more, though.
Anyway, thanks in advance!