I spent the morning customizing, copying directories for icons, libraries, etc., and installing Tuxcards and CBTracker. I always have to copy libraries for those two from an earlier VL installation. The copied libraries do not overwrite any existing libraries. Sound, proper video, Internet are all working. I'm getting MUCH better glxgears scores than I did in VL7 a4.
Everything was going great until it all went bad. I think there's a serious bug involved here, as the same thing happened in alpha 4.15.
I did something (not sure what) and my icons disappeared, my desktop background went from the picture I use to a darkish blue, and I can't change it. Programs look right except icons are missing. For example, I'm writing this in Firefox. Window controls such as Minimize, Maximize, Close, Pin, etc., are all there. Pictures in the window such as for ads, VL's Donate button, and so forth are there and right. But the icons for Go Back, Open a new tab, Reload, Stop Loading, are missing. Instead there's a little "page" with a red x in it. That's what desktop icons have, too. Launcher icons in the Panel are missing completely, but some icons for running programs are there; others have a generic icon. In XFce Settings, Desktop, Background tab, nothing is listed. I tried clicking on Add an image to the list and selected a file in /usr/share/wallpapers, but nothing was added to the Backgrounds list.
It seems something is amiss in the window manager and I have no idea how to fix it. This happened after I tried changing an icon for a launcher through XFce's new editor for Launcher properties. I also ran qtconfig and changed the GUI style. I don't know the exact sequence when the icons disappeared. I did run qtconfig again and changed back to the original GUI style.
I don't have icons if I run XFce as root, either.
What concerns me is that the exact same thing happened to me in alpha 4.15. I reported it here and asked if anyone had a fix, but got no answers to that. I suspect it's a simple fix. There has to be something wrong, a bug, I expect. I didn't do anything unusual or that any user might try.
I'll wait until tomorrow for an answer about how to fix this, if it's possible, but if I don't find out by tomorrow, I'll reinstall and not run qtconfig. If qtconfig is the culprit, I think it should be removed from the distro because running it may trash your installation.
Actually, things are working except for no icons and no possibility to change the background or add icons.
When a4.15 had the same problem, I tried going back to skel through VASM but that did no good. It's system wide (root has the same problem and I never ran a root desktop until I checked to see if the icons were missing).
I'm sort of tearing my hair out because I really liked what I was seeing until this happened.
--GrannyGeek