Either mate or cinnamon have toasted my gnome3 desktop. How to fix?

edit

I was trying out both mate and cinnamon, (on fedora 19) and have decided that gnome3 is really just fine. Only problem is that after reverting to gnome3 one or the other has caused the icons to show on the desktop permanantly. I have:

used gnome-tweak-tool and enabled/disabled the file manger handling the desktop. yum remove mate-* libmate* cinnamon muffin nemo-* mv ~.config ~.config.old; mv~.local .local.old; rm -fr ~/.cinnamon yum remove gnome-shell-extensions-* rm -fr ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions

Still icons on my desktop!!! Then:

created a new account and even then a new user gets icons on the desktop.

Where is this setting coming from?

(In the mean time will install a kvm and try to reproduce this.)