OK ... I found a fix that works beautifully, allowing me to display/run Conky while maintaining my desktop icons.
In your .conkyrc file, add the following lines:
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparency yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
If you are having a problem with flickering of your Conky window, add the following line to your .conkyrc file:
double_buffer yes
Now, I have my Conky running, with a transparent background.
parnote