Folders must be made executable?

[Kent Frazier]

I recently reinstalled Ubuntu from the Hoary Array 2 disc and almost
everything worked fine.  I ran into a rather strange issue with some
of the subdirectories in my home directory.  When I would open them in
nautilus, I could see the contents, but the application specific icons
were replaced with the generic gnome foot and I couldn't do anything
to any of the files, including open them.  When I try to list them
from the command line with ls (as normal user) it tells me permission
is denied.  By experimenting, I found I could make them work properly
by setting the executable bit, which was off for those that were
misbehaving.

Is this buggy behavior, or is this the way this is supposed to work? 
I had never run across this before, but that may have just been a
coincidence.

Kent