Recovering my Eee PC from a post-update problem

I recently applied a bunch of pending Eee updates from Asus, and suddenly the full desktop mode that I prefer stopped working. The Eee always booted into the basic interface, and when I switched back to advanced mode everything in my Desktop directory had disappeared (which is bad, because I have some customized launchers there)

(Fortunately I had an off-machine backup of my Desktop directory so I could restore my customizations.)

I enabled advanced desktop mode the easy way, namely by installing the advanced-desktop-eeepc package. After poking around and trying several things, what fixed the problem problem was to apt-get remove and then apt-get install the package again.

(I assume that something in one of the Asus updates overwrote a customization that the advanced desktop stuff required, although I couldn't spot anything obvious. It is a little disturbing to me that something was apparently deleting all additions to my Desktop folder, although I don't know whether this is something in the basic desktop or in the advanced desktop setup stuff.)

Sidebar: the launchers I've found useful

By 'launchers' I mean icons on the desktop that start various programs when clicked, which are created by .desktop files in your $HOME/Desktop directory. The ones I use are: blank the screen, start konsole, start xterm, and start a black-on-white xterm (instead of the default white on black colour scheme).