Every once and a while, I lose network connectivity to the point where my NFS share is unmounted and, when remounted, the Desktop fills up with everything in ~/.

The problem lies in the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. It should be as follows (for my setup):

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public" …

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