I am using Maemo 5, and I have a suddenly developed curios problem.

All the icons from all my desktop views have disappeared.
When I tap on the empty desktop a couple of times, the cog icon appears on the top of the screen and offers the standard option of "Desktop menu".
However when I tap on the Desktop menu option, nothing happens, absolutely no response!
So I can't add the widgets or shortcuts or manage views or anything like that.

Another thing -
The notification pop-ups of a missed call, and a skype conversation simply refuse to go away.
This is even though I cleared my entire recent call list, and tapping on both these notifications is unresponsive too.
The status menu applet is responsive, and works.
I can ssh into my phone, wifi works, can accept calls.

Things that I have already tried:
pkill hildon-home && pkill hildon-desktop
Reboot, remove battery, etc....
re-install of hildon-desktop using apt-get
Changed theme.
Googled for 48 hours and I can't seem to find any solution to this.

I love Maemo in my N900, been using ubuntu / debian for quite soem time, but always used Linux only on SSH.

I will be so grateful if somebody can help with this.

Thanks in advance.

Either my misery is making me more impatient, or nobody around who may have witnessed such a thing.

Anyways, if I could just learn how the hildon-home & hildon-desktop startup process works, I could try to figure this out myself.

To start with these are what I am trying to find out:
The files that are read by the process, as it starts up.
The configuration file and necessary changes in it that will make it do a more verbose logging into some log file.

Hope there's some real hack around who can tell me where I could find these.
Promise to share my experience further on it.
Thanks in advance.

Why don't you reinstall hildon-desktop, just in case something has messed up with it configuration files:

apt-get install --reinstall hildon-desktop

BTW one of the configuration files is /usr/share/hildon-desktop/transitions.ini. The other h-d settings are located in gconf AFAIK.

Ok the mystery deepens, and I have mixed feelings.
First the good news, as though by magic my N900 recovered, automatically almost by magic. Just a few desktop icons and widgets were gone, but I could simply add them back again.

The bad feeling is I couldn't find the documentation I was looking for.

AFAIK your symptoms match with hildon-home going nuts. No idea what can cause this (normally a reboot should have fixed it). Perhaps you have a misbehaving widget?

You say "just a few desktop icons and widgets were gone". Could it be that the only icons/widgets left were those from Nokia? I think there's a whitelist somewhere, but can't check at the moment.

Now that my phone's behaving normally, I could calmly recollect and retrace the chain of events, and I guess if some hack who knows better, gets to read it, there may be some clues getting revealed.

It was late afternoon, I was logged into skype via my phone, and also via my Windows desktop. A conversation started with somebody, and I used my desktop during this conversation. The conversation was fairly long. This is quite usual way of living for me, because I do find using my desktop's keyboard more comfortable when I am in a tech discussion. Normally this causes the conversation to keep getting reflected on my phone too. But that day I guess something went wrong, the conversation did not reflect on my phone for quite some time. Later all of a sudden my phone went kind of berserk. All the conversation started to jingle on my phone and it was going on rather incessantly, driving me nuts. I tried to cut this off by logging off from skype from my phone. The jingling didn't stop, and the notifications kept ringing on my phone. I went to the conversations dialog, and tapped for "Clear this conversation". The jingling still didn't stop. And also realized that all the desktop icons and widgets were gone - from all the views. The notifications still seemed to loop. I rebooted my phone and still found that the notifications were looping on the desktop. No luck! the desktop was still a clean slate, though I could still use the task switcher to go to the other areas and make my phone calls and do almost everything else. Switched off the phone pulled out the battery, put it back in, and restarted. No luck, the situation persists. I switched off again, this time pulled out my SIM and started the phone again. The situation still remained the same. Put the SIM back in, and restarted the phone. No change in situation. All through during the situation, I could SSH into my phone, and see that hildon-home and hildon-desktop seemed to be using a lot of CPU, and tried those pkills on these processes. The looping of the notifications kept going on. I even deleted the /home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/el-v1.db file before and after these pkills. Looked up this site, and thought that if I may be able to get the looping cycle to complete sooner things might normalize. So I tried those tranisition.ini hacks. Nothing seemed to work. Even reinstalling the hildon-* was useless. Day 2 - Frustrated, I made the first post on this thread hoping somebody might know better. Still no luck.

Third -day I suddenly found the phone was back to normal.
Hope the hildon hackers can figure out something out of this, and yes if someone queries, I can try to give more clues objectively.

Though I really hope there was better and accessible documentation.

It seems quite obvious from your description that it was skype that went berserk.

always give it a flash if you dont know whats happening out there . N900 is a miracle itself !

There is a program called Desktop Activity Manager that deals with that problem, if I understood you correctly.