nautilus issues

[Jason Pinkney]

Dear Linux gurus,
I'm having problems with my gnome desktop/nautilus.
I'm running Fedora core 2,  gnome-desktop-2.0.

I had this problems before, but I can't remember the
solution.  Here are some symptoms:
1. When I reboot, my desktop comes up without my
     chosen background and without my desktop icons.
     The panels are ok.
2. Right-clicking on the background does nothing
3. Trying to run nautilus from the command line does nothing.
4. Logging out takes so long that I get impatient and kill X.
5. I've been able to get the desktop back to normal by logging
     in with a KDE desktop, fiddling with things, and then going
     back to gnome.  Also, by killing X, fiddling around with things
      (like killing stray nautilus commands) and then typing "startx".
     However, when I log out again, the dialogue does not include
     the check box for save the current desktop.  (How can that happen??)
      And completely rebooting makes it messed up again.
Any ideas?

thanks,
Jason