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Whenever I reboot my system or end my current KDE session and begin a new one, the icons on my desktop move to different places. The ~/share/apps/kdesktop/IconPositions file reverts to the state that it was in before I moved the icons to where I want them to be. The icons always move to the same places and this problem is limited to when I have the "Align to Grid" option checked on the desktop.

If I uncheck the "Align to Grid" option before I restart, that fixes the problem except for the fact that when the system is restarted, the icons are almost in the correct places but not lined up. Thus, I have to turn on the "Align to Grid" option again and then turn it off before shutting down, which I don't want to have to do every time I reboot my laptop.

I think that part of the problem may have been related to entries in IconPositions for files that had been deleted from the desktop. Several entries persisted despite the deletion of the files. I think that the positions used by those deleted files may account for the places on the desktop that my current icons will not appear in. This would explain why I don't have the problem when "Align to Grid" is off, because then icons can overlap.

I tried deleting these entries using Kate, but they kept reappearing when I moved any icons or when I restarted my KDE session. I finally got rid of them by booting up with KDM disabled (so that no KDE session would be running) and deleting those entries using nano, and now they don't reappear. However, the current icons still revert to their original locations.

It appears to me that KDE caches the IconPositions file and does not update that cache when changes are restart made (although it will update the IconPositions file in the kdesktop directory). Then, when I end my KDE session, the incorrect cached information overwrites the IconPositions file.

A workaround is that I can make the changes in my IconPositions file, copy it to a new filename, reboot without KDE, and overwrite the incorrect file with the correct backup copy. This works, but it is quite a pain to do on a semi-regular basis.

Does anyone know how to clear or refresh this cache that I believe exists or some other way to actually FIX the problem as opposed to working around it?

Thanks,
Ben Smith

edit: I'm running KDE 3.5.6 under Kubuntu Edgy, although my google search seems to indicate that this problem is not specific to my configuration.