This still happens on my system (Qiana, Cinnamon 2.2.13, Nemo 2.2.2). No, I don't have Nautilus installed!<Moderator on>
Please, note:
This thread has been split from that thread: 1.6.7: Desktop icons are gone, missing setting in options.
Cinnamon 1.6.7 came with Mint 13. Cinnamon 2.0.14 followed Cinnamon 1.6.7 and came to Mint 13 as a backport from the now obsolete Mint 16.
The last post in that thread about Cinnamon 1.6.7 was posted in March 2013, here.
Then this post about Cinnamon 2.2.13 was post 1.25 years later in Aug. 2014. Cinnamon 2.2.13 came with Mint 17.
That thread should not have been revived: different Mint LTS releases, pretty different Cinnamon releases, no more Nautilus on Mint 17, etc pp.
</Moderator off>
I found the following workaround to avoid the disappearing icons:
Add the command «/bin/sh -c "killall nemo && nemo -n&"» to the startup applications. This will kill the initially started instance of nemo and will start a new instance as an own process.
The similar solution posted above won't work, since the instance controlling the desktop is still running when starting the new one.