Strange desktop behaviour

Hello Just beginning to roll out AD authentication and SMB windows home mounting for our Macs. Everything seems good on the test Mac / Windows account. I had a Keychain / Safari glitch which I ironed out with Keychain Minder and appears to be gone. The odd thing is my desktop. If I open a Finder window, I get all the normal Windows/OS X folders in my home. There are two desktops, a plain folder icon called 'desktop' and the OS X desktop icon 'Desktop'. Both of these, opened as windows, will take new files/folders and reflect the changes. My actual desktop, visible in the Finder, shows the internal hard drive icon and nothing else, regardless of what is in the desktop/Desktop folder (they appear to point to the same folder). If I try to drag a file out of a Finder window to the desktop, I get a permissions denied no access mouse icon. The permissions on the desktop/Desktop folders are good. If I contextual menu on the Finder desktop and choose 'New Folder' the Finder kind of refreshes (like force relaunching) and then the new folder will appear, along with whatever is in the desktop/Desktop folders. If I try to drag to this new desktop display, it refresh/relaunches back to being just the hard drive icon no permission desktop. It's as if the system doesn't know what to display in the Finder as the desktop, and what it does display at login is a none-accessible phantom desktop with nothing but the hard drive icon (I can't even Get Info any details for it). Is this to do with resource forks? I'm about to try a new AD account from scratch. cheers