Ubuntu – Where does the Unity Dash get its launchers from

As it is only constrained to your user account, it must have something to do with your user.

Maybe one of the .desktop files in your home folder is tripping the launcher up? Can you try moving the files in these folders all somewhere else:

• /home/<youruser>/.gnome/apps/
• /home/<youruser>/.local/usr/share/applications/

e.g.

$ mkdir backup_local
$ mkdir backup_gnome
$ mv .local/share/applications/*.desktop backup_local/
$ mv .gnome/apps/*.desktop backup_gnome/

Then logout, login and see if it changed anything? You can always move them back in if it didn't help. If it did help, try moving them in one by one to which file was the culprit.

EDIT: You can find out which one was malformed:

1. Install the desktop-file-utils package:

   sudo apt-get install desktop-file-utils 
   

2. Check each of the .desktop files for validity using desktop-file-validate:

   desktop-file-validate .local/share/applications/*.desktop
   desktop-file-validate .gnome/apps/*.desktop
   

   Or of course at the different location if you already moved it. It will print nothing if all files are OK. If any of the files are malformed, it will print one error message per line.

   You might also want to check the other desktop files for good measure:

   desktop-file-validate /usr/share/applications/*.desktop
   

This works very nicely on my system:

find $HOME/.wine -name '*.lnk' -type f -exec bash -c 'wine winemenubuilder "$0"' {} \;

It does the following:

1. scans your Wine drive for windows .lnk files
2. creates a Linux .desktop file for each .lnk file
3. creates a folder $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine
4. places all of the newly created .desktop files in there

Pretty cool?

References:

• Winemenubuilder