The Gnome desktop start-here:/// folder has been empty forever. As Celtis said more than a year ago: "They're not in because (as the other thread says) the tools don't work properly on Gentoo. If you really need them desperately try searching http://bugs.gentoo.org for a bug report and bump it or (only if one doesn't exist) create one asking if they could be fixed for Gentoo... the worst they can do is say no!" Has been any advance in Gnome System Tools compatibility with Gentoo? Is there any way of making start-here:/// work again?
The gnome-system-tools package is now part of the official gnome releases, and there have been ebuilds for it in our tree since May 2004. On the other hand, the start-here:/// URI has been removed from gnome-vfs. The replacement for the corresponding, deprecated module is 'gnome-menus' in case you-re interested in studying this further.
Thank you for the explanation and extra info. I'll remove my "start here" desktop icon, as appears to have been obsolete for some time.