Comment # 11 on bug 900728 from Dominique Leuenberger

That's not new here: killing nautilus is like switching the background painter
off and then nautilus works.

I do suspect that the new version would already allow you to:
- have nautilus draw your desktop icons (don't be so violent and kill it)
- In the dashbar, you can right click nautilus and trigger new window (the
default action is to get to the running nautilus, which is your desktop).

Can you confirm this? Then it's not perfect, but a step in the right direction.