I should add that I know I can use the terminal with "chflags nohidden" to unhide each individual desktop file (I eventually did that). If there were more, I could even have written a script to loop through all of them. But it was a huge hassle and I assume other, less tech savvy users, might not know how to restore them and even panic thinking the files are now permanently gone since the option that is supposed to restore them again does not.