Clint, the nautilus-open-terminal package may be (sadly?) one of my proudest achievements in doing something technical in Fedora.
I’ve maintained that package since Fedora Core 5, when GNOME removed the terminal opening function from the default Desktop quick menu. I actually agreed with the change — if the average user can’t do something without a terminal, it’s a bug. But a lot of power users loved that quick terminal shortcut, so while a lot of people started arguing about whether or not it was good, I found the nautilus-open-terminal package on the web and used it, somewhat selfishly, as an excuse to start maintaining packages in Fedora.
The functionality of nautilus-open-terminal was extended earlier in the year to allow the extension to understand when it’s called from a different folder window (or by right-clicking a folder itself), to open a terminal using that folder as a working directory. So the question remained, what should clicking on the Desktop do? After all, the Desktop is a folder. The default, therefore, is to open a terminal from the Desktop, in the Desktop folder.
If you don’t like that behavior, it’s easy to change:
gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/nautilus-open-terminal/desktop_opens_home_dir true
Or use the gconf-editor package which many people like as a GUI interface to GConf.
Update: Meant to do a trackback when I posted, sorry for noise.