cleanup of gnome desktop

Does someone know how to get rid of the icons that gnome/nautilus insists on putting on the desktop? One or two is all right, but Ihave one for the floppy, one for usb, and so on. I tried modifying files in ~/.nautilus/xml but either nothing happened else gnome failed to start right, stumbled around a while, then recreated all the gurp on the desktop for me. Thanks, Henry Harpending