Mavericks desktop unresponsive, missing icons

Question

My Mavericks desktop has all of a sudden become unresponsive and all the icons are missing though I can see them in Finder. I can't drag any files to the desktop. Can't copy/paste. I can't even right click to bring up the context menu or even drag out a selection box. It's completely blank other than my wallpaper and won't do anything.
I'm on 10.9.5.
I don't know if this is related but I recently made an Automator script I found online to show/hide invisible files because I needed it. This is the shell script that runs:
is_shown=$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)
if [ $is_shown != "TRUE" ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi
I did it once to show and once to hide. I did this yesterday but only noticed this issue today. I'm pretty sure it was working fine yesterday after this and this morning.
I have restarted my computer several times and it still doesn't work. I also found this other solution to run this in Terminal but it didn't work:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchSe rvices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
What can i do??

Answer 1

Do a backup.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J.  When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder.  Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.desktop.plist. Move the .plists to your desktop.
Restart and test. If it works okay, delete the plists from the desktop.
If the same, return the .plists to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.