Desktop launchers do not work

[Dmitry Mikhin <dmitrym acres com au>]

Hello, everyone!

I have a strange problem with my Gnome desktop in FC6. In a nutshell: 
gnome treats launchers as plain text files.

E.g., if I right-click on the desktop, select 'Create Launcher', fill in 
all the details (say to run gnome-terminal), the system creates a file 
on the desktop called 'Terminal.desktop' (this is how the file name is 
shown, including the extension). Then if you click on this file, it is 
opened in text editor. If you right-click on the file and select 
'Properties', the file type is 'text/plain', not 'desktop configuration 
file', as on other boxes. The file permissions seems to be the same as 
on other computers (660, user_u:object_r:user_home_t). The behavior 
exists only for one user, others (tested as root) can create proper 
launchers.

Attempts to solve the issue so far:
- reinstalled all gnome rpms with --replacefiles --replacepkgs
- removed and re-created ~/.gnome, ~/.gnome2, and a few other similar 
directories
- relabeled everything in SELinux
- changed the desktop theme back and forth
- restored the defaults using 'gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps' 
(also /system, /desktop)

Does not work so far.

The system is a pretty generic box, 32-bit. Very little customization 
done, all updates applied regularly (and the problem was seemingly 
triggered by one of the updates, and then went for a few days without 
noticing, as everything worked fine when configured first time upon 
install).

Any ideas?

P.S. I'm not subscribed to this list. Please, cc the replies to me.

Best regards,
Dmitry