Hello,
Sproggy, the files are also all at linuxtracker. You can see that
here. (I see there were also added long after... )
When an iso is downloaded from torrent, there is a md5sum created, therefore the download should not be corrupted. It is even more secure for the integrity than a download from within a web browser as some people do. In any case a bad burn is always possible, or even a CD/DVD device with a lens dirty (even slightly) can corrupt a tiny part of the datas while installing (met with the case long ago, and reinstall fixed the problem).
Sorcerer, Just in case you still have the ISO and the CD, would you check md5sum on each of them ? If you need to know how, there is a page at the wiki,
here.
When providing ISOS we might want to become more paranoiac, and also provide the sha1sum.

Before deciding to download anew and reinstall, I still would like the output of "ls -l" in the home directory and just above.
And what about gvfs ? Isn't it gvfs that rules the trashcan ? Maybe a reinstall of a few packages could be enough to fix the problem ? (Which ones have gvfs as dependancy ? Thunar ? some libs ? Maybe libxfcemcs ? It might be possible to try a reinstall of some packages ?)