Disappearing desktop images

Firstly, apologies of this has been covered before ... I've had a look around and haven't been able to find anything similar.
Since installing 10.5, I'm finding that, periodically, when I open System Preferences and go to 'Desktop & Screensavers', the images in the various default folders don't appear in the list of images available. This will vary from time to time ... sometimes 'Apple Images' will appear empty, sometimes 'Nature', etc. etc. When I open my ~Library/Desktop Pictures folder they're all there, and shutting down System Preferences and then relaunching will sometimes fix the problem, although at other times it will sometimes just alter which folder is missing images. I don't have any of my own pictures in that folder ... just the default ones which came with the OS, and I haven't fiddled around with any file names or settings that I'm aware of.
Much as I love the look of the new OS, this, the fact that my keyboard randomly locks up, all the 'ACL found but not expected' errors I get in disk utility has been causing a lot of frustration over the last week. Bring on 10.5.1!
Any help appreciated.

OK then, here's where things get interesting ... the com.apple.desktop.plist doesn't seem to exist in either my user/Library/Preferences/, or in my Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences/. A quick search in Spotlight only seems to find old Safari cache references to that file (from when I was searching these forums) and nothing else.

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