Traditional Desktop Problems

Hi,

I've disabled the default 4-panel desktop and replaced it with the standard traditional desktop (xfdesktop-xfce).

I've made several links on the desktop by right-clicking files in the file manager and selecting "Send To > Desktop (create link)".
For some reason, these links have all been associated with a program (gens) and now, instead of opening in their respective programs it attempts to open them in Gens, which errors as they are not valid files (these are links to folders which should open in file manager and links to shell scripts which should just execute). Right clicking on them shows "Open with 'gens'" and even when I select "open with other application" and try to set a new default it opens them with it once but always reverts back to Gens.

Even more strangely, if I go to "Settings > Desktop Settings > Behavior" and toggle off/on "Allow xfce to manage the desktop" the desktop reloads with proper associations and appropriate icons for all my shortcuts. Once I restart they all become associated with Gens again. They are described when I hover over them as "Kind: broken link".

Does anybody have any idea what could be causing this? It was working perfectly until this suddenly started happening.

Cheers

 

When you log out are you saving the session?

 

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'm not knowingly doing anything to do with sessions - I'm just using the shutdown icon in the bottom right of the screen and selecting shutdown. I'm not prompted for anything when I do.

This started happening out-of-the-blue one day - maybe the result of a bad shutdown?

I've also noticed that "Open with GENS" is shown as an option in the right-click menu for every single file type in the File Manager (although at least in File Manager the correct DEFAULT program for each file-type is in place).

It seems like GENS has become some sort of system-wide default for opening files, and rather than attempting to resolve these "broken" links on the desktop and open them properly it's just reverting to opening them in GENS. Before the issue, it was still calling them "broken link" but was at least opening them properly when I double-clicked them.

Also, there is one link on the desktop ("html") which always works fine??? Strange, as it doesn't seem to be special in any way.

Here is the output of an "ls" in the Desktop directory:

Code:

[user@localhost home]$ cd Desktop
[user@localhost Desktop]$ ls -la
total 24
drwxrwxr-x  2 user user 4096 2009-05-25 16:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 56 user user 4096 2009-05-25 17:17 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user  184 2009-05-19 19:10 Firefox.desktop
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   13 2009-05-23 14:13 html -> /var/www/html
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   35 2009-05-24 22:27 Mount -> /home/user/Desktop/Tools/mountxp.sh
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   15 2009-05-24 22:38 Tools -> /mnt/home/Tools
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   37 2009-05-24 22:27 Unmount -> /home/user/Desktop/Tools/unmountxp.sh
-rw-rw-r--  1 user user  207 2009-05-19 22:36 VLC.desktop
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user   33 2009-05-24 22:32 VNC -> /mnt/home/Desktop/Tools/runvnc.sh

Thanks