Unfortunately I had to revert the machine to Dapper and I won't be able to run Edgy on it for a while.
For your questions: - The desktop does work with the default (en) locale. - Nautilus works when this happens. It simply opens a window rather than displaying the desktop. Panels et al. still work. - Can't determine the key due to Edgy unavailability (above). -- Enabling Italian as the default language prevents Nautilus desktop from working in Edgy https://launchpad.net/bugs/69036 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs