nautilus not showing up

[Bram Kuijper]

Hi all,

since a while I can still start any instances of nautilus, but the 
nautilus windows won't show themselves anywhere. If I give the nautilus 
command from the commandline, it gives no debug errors or whatsoever. 
Does anyone has had the same problem?

Although nautilus is not showing up, if I do a ps aux | grep nautilus, 
all nautilus instances are apparently still running:

bram       355  0.0  0.4  38964  8404 ?        S    15:05   0:00 
nautilus --no-desktop file:///home/bram/PDF%20Archive
bram       367  0.0  0.4  38960  8396 ?        S    15:05   0:00 
nautilus --no-desktop file:///home/bram
bram       382  0.0  0.4  38960  8396 ?        S    15:05   0:00 
nautilus --no-desktop file:///home/bram
bram      1325  0.0  0.4  38964  8400 ?        S    16:46   0:00 
nautilus --no-desktop file:///home/bram/Varsity/Work
bram      1512  0.0  0.0   2980   764 pts/0    S+   16:54   0:00 grep 
nautilus
bram     14866  0.0  1.8  94064 37076 ?        S    Dec01   0:18 
nautilus --no-default-window --sm-client-id default2
bram     14930  0.0  0.0   2664   900 ?        S    Dec01   0:00 
/usr/lib/nautilus-cd-burner/mapping-daemon
bram     32575  0.0  0.4  38964  8400 ?        S    14:54   0:00 
nautilus --no-desktop file:///home/bram

Does the --no-desktop flag mean something important? If I look in the 
help of nautilus, it says that this flag means "do not manage the 
Desktop", whatever that means...

anyone any info on how to get nautilus showing up on my desktop again?

thanks in advance,
Bram