Sporadically, everything missing on desktop after boot

Hello. New to Zorin, but liking what I've seen so far. Been using Ubuntu or similar for many years, but still low to moderate knowledge of the internals.

My issue is that for about one boot in five, Zorin will come up with the taskbar looking normal (so I can get to my programs), but everything is gone off of my desktop. I normally have a few system icons displayed (home folder, network, trash can) and some links to folders. They aren't deleteed, because when I reboot, they are still there. They just aren't displayed.

FYI, I have a custom wallpaper (photo of a lake), and I'm using an external monitor, with the laptop display turned off. Since it's sporadic like this, strikes me as some kind of a race condition going on, but - like I said - I'm pretty ignorant.

I tried restarting the display manager with systemctl, but that doesn't fix it (and I seem to lose my mouse in the process).

Wondering if anyone has seen this before or any ideas. Thanks in advance.

I've had the occasional loss of desktop but not as frequent as yourself. Usually logging out and logging back in resolves the issue. Ctrl+ Alt+ Del to get logout bar.

I had this problem with Zorin 12.

I fould that using nautilus to look at "desktop" magically restored the normal desktop display after nautilus was closed.


Strange but true!

Weirdly this happened to me again today - needed a reboot. ("Have you tried turning it off and on again?")

To add another instance, I have been having the same problem regularly. Have been looging off and back in again to bring icons back in view.