Desktop icons not showing

[pixmaniowa]

I'm afraid I did something stupid. I accidently dragged the contents of my trashcan to the desktop. It had over 2000 items and 2 gigs of info in it. (I was cleaning out old files) I could not stop the process so I force shut down the computer. I know this was wrong but I did it. Now none of the icons will show on the desktop. I have restarted the computer again with no help. The proper items do show in the desktop list when selected in a finder window. I am using a G5 1.8Ghz computer System OS X 10.4.5. I tried rebuilding the desktop in the Classic control panel. Thank you for your help.

[Tommo]

If the desktop folder size gets very large or certain types of files are placed on it I have found that is can cause this problem. The only way I found round it was to login as a different user and open a terminal window and su to root to give you access to the folder.

Navigate to the relevant users desktop folder and copy all the files to a different location and delete them from the desktop folder. You should them be able to copy back the ones you need as using finder when you log back in as the original user. Hope this makes sense.

Might be worth emptying the wastebasket a bit more often in the future as well :-)

[fryke]

Apparently, you _are_ logged into your account. So you may be able to start the Terminal from there... You can do this (hit enter after every line there...):

cd Desktop
mkdir stuff
mv * stuff/

This should put everything on the Desktop inside a folder named "stuff". You should be able to look at this folder in Column view. Then you can start sorting and put things back on the Desktop. Don't put more than, say, 10 things on the Desktop. Every icon is handled by the system like a window, i.e. it takes resources. One of the reasons the Finder isn't exactly "snappy".