Icon for Desktop Shows Up as a Generic Icon in the Places Sidebar

Had the same issue on my 2011 iMac running 10.6.8, and here's how I fixed it.

1. Went into my home folder
2. Clicked the Desktop icon and pressed command+i
3. Clicked on the top small icon on the new window that pops up
4. Press command+c to copy
5. Press the generic Desktop icon on the sidebar
6. Press command+v to paste. Now at this time, the icon was incorrect as it pasted the actual blue version of the icon, so I clicked command+z to undo, and the correct version (minuture desktop w/ dock) showed up.

Wow. That's stunning. I don't really know why it works, but it does. Apparently when you paste something on top of the icon in the sidebar, and remove it, it refreshes itself and somehow remembers the original icon?

I deleted something and had several blank white icons in the sidebar, so I removed them and restored by pulling them back on from my home folder. Everything worked except the Desktop. First it was the blank white icon. Then I pulled it from my home folder and it was a plain blue icon with the generic page symbol, such as a standard Documents folder icon. Then I fiddled with it and pulled it over again and it changed to the generic blue desktop icon you see in the home folder. Last I tried your step of just pasting the generic desktop icon over it and undo-ing that paste, and viola!

Many thanks for sharing. I could have forced myself to live with the generic, but it wouldn't have been the same, and not truly satisfactory, as it wasn't back the way I started. Insert applause.

pete