I've been wanting to start doing everything in a more low-level way than is provided by Gnome. One of the things I want to do is move my startup applications from gnome-session-properties to .bash_profile. I've worked (or cut) out most of the kinks but one remains: I can't get nautilus to launch automatically. It works fine when opening from the menus and such, but I don't get a desktop unless I launch it from the terminal or the trash applet.