Nautilus windows not showing up

["Moore, Chris (ESL Roseville)" <chris moore hp com>]

I'm a newbie as far as Gnome and Nautilus are concerned but have lots
of experience with Unix in general.  I've been running Ubuntu for a
few months now and I've got an odd problem that shows up now and then.

Sometimes when I log in my desktop icons aren't there.  I try selecting
something from the "Places" menu and nothing happens.  Doing a "ps -ef"
shows a bunch of nautilus processes running, but none seem to be actually
working.

I tried just doing a "nautilus" command from the shell.  The process starts
and sits there, no windows show up, no error messages are displayed.  I
also tried just doing an "xterm" to make sure my DISPLAY is set correctly,
and it is.

Can anyone give me any troubleshooting tips?  Does nautilus have any kind
of error logging to a file, or is there a way to turn on some debugging to
figure out why it's broken?

Thanks,

Chris