F16 Desktop Vanished

[Jonathan Allen]

Dear List,

I recently installed F16/XFCE-spin on my daughter's laptop (as its hardware
can't cope with Gnome 3).  The desktop was set up fine, with the usual
folders, a few of her documents and a background picture as wallpaper.
All of a sudden, the screen desktop is clean, no folder and no wallpaper.
The files/documents still exist and can be accessed in ~/Desktop but they
are not displayed any more.  Changing the wallpaper using the XFCE display
settings has no effect.

Can anyone tell me what happened or how to fix it?

Jonathan