Gnome and KDE menus empty

[Tobias Niemann <tobias@tobias-niemann.de>]

Hi,

I have a problem with the menus of Gnome and KDE. The applications menu
is completely empty and the System menu isn't filled properly either.
/usr/share/applications is filled with lots of .desktop files and I ran
update-menus, too. I'd like to know how the generation of the menu files
and structure (subdirectories) works, if there are any other
configuration files or possibilities to generate the menus, and where
the actual generated configuration file is stored.

Can anybody help?

Thanks a lot,
Tobias