Q: All of my desktop icons periodically disappear for a second and then reappear on my macbook air

Golden. Thanks for the post... solved my same issue.

Arigato. Worked for me.

Yes that works! Hope it might also stop Word opening every file I've used in the past month when I restart....?

Thank you. Closing Google Drive has solved the problem of flickering icons!

Thanks for the tip.

I was starting to get a bit irritated having spent a few hours trying to find the problem.

Cheers

/Bobby

... count me in as well.

It worked on my iMac.

Many thanks for posting this!

TO ALL THAT HAVE ISSUES WITH REFRESHING DESKTOP EVERY 60 SECONDS:  Read jimmyrin solution on page 1. 

thank you jimmyrin. I disabled the 'Show file...................' and it stopped refreshing every 60 secs.  Sounds like all Apple users with google drive are experiencing the same problem.  I hope they read your comment.  Thanks again, catch a rainbow.

Allow me a shout-out to fwmaietta: your solution saved me from going crazy this morning! Thanks!

HOORAY for whoever figured out the solution! Problem solved.

Worked for me too! Thanks.

Same here, all of sudden all the icons on the desktop disappear and appear after 1 sec. Impossible to do some operations like copying files, these operations fails. Turning off sync status from Google Drive seems has solved the problem.

This seems to have fixed the issue on my Mac as well. Thank you!

Add me to the list of those that found this fix here! 

I thought I was going nuts, couldn't figure out what had changed.  Turned off Google Sync in preferences and all is good.

Again, thanks for the fix!

fwmaietta -

Thank you for taking the time for being so clear. And especially being so clear this far down in the thread. I guess everyone else knows how to the to the Google Drive Preferences, but I was too dense to figure it out.

I had wasted a bit of time trying to find the Google Drive Preferences.  (Obviously) you don't get to the Preferences in the normal way  by opening Google Drive App. I had forgotten about the Google Drive Icon at the top of the screen because I rarely use Google Drive.

[I had been trying to copy several large (200GB) files between two FW800 drives, but the copying would stop each time the Finder appeared to relaunch (about every 45 seconds).  Things seem OK now, but I can't test the copying yet because I moved the copy operation to another Mac and it won't finish for another hour. I was planning to upgrade that Mac to Mavericks yesterday. Certainly am glad I was slow.]

And thanks to everyone for figuring this out and taking the time to post.

Google appears to have fixed the issue - a restart of the Google Drive app is required.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/drive/report-a-problem/k qdqmoMWtk8%5B1-25-true%5D