No desktop after buidling from jhbuild

["J. Gardner Biggs" <gardnerbiggs houston rr com>]

I finally was able to build the gnome-desktop 2.8 module set via
jhbuild.  Hooray!

The only problem is that nautilus is not drawing the desktop or allowing
me to browse the file system.  Yet it is running per the system monitor.

2.7.4 runs fine from a garnome built session in /opt/gnome-2.7.4

I had jhbuild install to /opt/gnome-2.7.x

Any ideas?  

jhbuild configured gnome-vfs to build without --enable-hal, that was one
suggested problem.

help!  Am I failing to perform something post install?