No application or applet icons in gmome-shell-3.10.3

[John Frankish <j-frankish slb com>]

I'm using gnome-shell on a simple linux system having compiling the various components from source.

Whilst things seem to work well in the "activities view", I do not get any application icons on the desktop 
nor applet icons in the top panel.

I can use nautilus to navigate to /usr/local/share/applications and launch various gnome apps by 
double-clicking on the *desktop files, so things seem to be in order, but I cannot figure out why there are 
no application icons on the desktop.

Note that I've enabled desktop icons using dconf-editor, but this does not change anything - any 
trouble-shooting suggestions would be welcome.

Regards
John