Recovering from a crash

[Dan Phiffer <dan phiffer com>]

Hello,

I'm somewhat new to Gnome, but I have used *nix for some time. The 
problem I'm having has to do with an unexpected crash of Nautilus. I'm 
using Red Hat 8.0 and Gnome desktop 2.0.6-4.

I'm not sure what the cause of the crash was, but I was trying to 
directly view PDF files (as opposed to saving to a directory) from 
Mozilla, but upon completing the download nothing happened. That is, the 
helper application (xpdf) didn't kick in, so I downloaded the file and 
attempted to open it manually. However, when clicking on the icon for my 
home directory (on the desktop), Nautilus promptly crashed, removing the 
icons from my desktop but keeping the desktop background image in tact.

I still don't have desktop icons and now the desktop background image 
has disappeared, even after restarting my computer. Furthermore the 
nicely rendered Red Hat login screen has been replaced by the hideous 
XFree86 default login. How do I begin debugging this, and how can I get 
my old desktop goodies back?

Thanks,
-Dan