Comment 168 for bug 1335492

I have now written a patch script to deal with this problem on my machine as it's been like this for many years with no progress. I don't understand the internals, but it occurs 100% when the desktop starts laying out icons before the underlying system has read the configuration (it occasionally gets the first couple), so starts "not knowing" where icons go, so creates a new entry, starting from the left side of the screen. I have eradicated the problem by holding a backup of the configuration, waiting for disk activity to drop to near zero after login, then restoring the backup and reloading the configuration. It takes a short while before the desktop sorts itself, but entirely fixes the problem. My job then watches the configuration file to see if it's subsequently updated, requiring a new backup. All the talk of multiple monitors and so on is a separate issue unrelated to the bug itself.