Annoying problem and no solution, yet.
Even sometimes there is no response at all and no notification about new SMS or missed calls, until I kill hildon-home.

About widgets removed from desktop, this is easy to handle:
just make a save copy of Your widgets
cp /home/user/.config/hildon-desktop/home.plugins /home/user/.config/hildon-desktop/home.plugins.save
in time. And when this problem occurs, just
sudo killall hildon-home
and after some seconds
cp /home/user/.config/hildon-desktop/home.plugins.save /home/user/.config/hildon-desktop/home.plugins
I've put those commands into some executable scripts, just open xterm and type
sh scriptname.

This way You get, at least, Your widgets back

--edit
Please see here
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=34
for more details.

My desktop shortcuts just get frozen again. Now I think that I can definitely exclude DCEW which was removed before I upgrade phone to kernel47.

Mine too. Seconded. What an ugly bug we have here.

Well, problems incremented since Desktop Execution Commands reinstall. It's freezing all days, one time minimum. It's really f*cking annoying.

You all are probably already aware of this thread, though it offers no solution that I'm aware of. Perhaps someone could merge 'em?

widgets disappearing
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=43144

I have the bug too and reported it: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12009
I suspected CSSU because it appeared after an update of CSSU and so far I could also exclude power kernel as the source of the error.

Do your contact shortcuts still work? Because mine do even when nothing else does.

If I remember correctly, the contact shortcuts kept working. it's been a while since I've gotten that far, as now it always crashes on desktop editing while doing anything with DCE widgets. I deleted .desktop_cmd_exec, then restored it, and now everything seems to work. I'll see if I get it to crash again.

Any ideas on how to stop the desktop from freezing?

a workaround until this is fixed: write a script that gets run every hour and checks if hildon-desktop is still running ok. If the desktop is frozen it could be restarted using peterleinchens idea above.

All that is needed is to find a way for the script to determine if the desktop is still alive. Perhaps a dbus query that fails when the desktop shortcuts are frozen. I'll try different dbus queries when the freeze happens again.

No ideas on that, but to make restoring as effortless as possible, you could do what I did and create a shortcut for the script and place it in the system menu, I placed mine under "Desktop".

Here's an outline for an idea:
1. add a desktop widget which touches file1 to update its timestamp when the widget runs.
2. using a mechanism which is *not* dependent on the desktop being alive, but which can know when a widget *should* be activated (e.g., some kind of notification that the desktop is being displayed), touch file2 to update its timestamp whenever the widget's *should* run.
3. A background script can periodically compare the timestamps of file1 and file2, if file1 lags, it's a good indication that the desktop is not alive.

I'm just not sure how to do (2) ...