Nautilus acting up

[rikona]

When I minimize Nautilus, it essentially disappears. Usually, when
something is minimized, a small white triangle appears next to the
icon for that program, and when multiple instances are minimized there
is a triangle for each instance. When I minimize Nautilus, there is
never a single white triangle no matter how many instances of Nautilus
I have minimized. Also, when I use alt tab to see what's running in
that workspace NONE of the minimized instances of Nautilus are shown.
So, Nautilus has disappeared and I don't know how to get it back after
it is minimized. 

Nautilus is missing some features I like so I added dolphin as an
alternate file manager. Dolphin minimizes correctly and produces small
white triangles on the dolphin icon, and each dolphin instance is
shown with alt tab - it works like all the other programs. I noticed
that Nautilus and dolphin use the same icon. Is it possible that the
use of the same icon is causing the problem? Did the installation of
dolphin cause the problem with Nautilus? 

Another major annoyance, for me, with Nautilus is that when I drag a
few files from one Nautilus window into an unopened folder in another
Nautilus window, Nautilus insists on opening and displaying the
unopened folder instead of just accepting the moved/copied files. In
some cases I may have 50,000 files in that unopened folder and trying
to open/display that number of files seems to cause ALL the instances
of Nautilus to be unresponsive for perhaps a minute or so - VERY
annoying! Is there a way to get Nautilus to NOT open the folder I am
trying to drag files into and just copy/move the files into the folder
as I wanted?

Another problem with Nautilus is that when I select a file, press F2
to allow editing, then copy a part of the filename, I can't seem to
paste what I just copied into other programs. It either gives me
nothing or the last thing I copied from someplace else. If I follow
that procedure in dolphin I can paste what I copied into other
programs. Why does that not work in Nautilus? 

I'm not particularly happy with Nautilus, but some reading suggests
that Nautilus also has control over part of the desktop function and
can't be eliminated. I'm considering using Nemo as a Nautilus
replacement but that seems to be associated with the cinnamon desktop,
which I presume will be installed with Nemo. Is it likely the addition
of yet another desktop will introduce a new set of problems in Ubuntu?
I already have some KDE programs installed, which probably brought in
a lot of the additional KDE components.

Thanks,

 rikona