Thanks. And the good news is that I have solved the problem, the bad news is that I didn't actually need this pic from you, so my apologies for the run-around.

A messed up ~/.config/user-dir.dirs file was to blame. All the XDG directories were pointing to $HOME, once I set them all to the right places (eg XDG_PICTURES_DIR=$HOME/MyDocs/Pictures), and ran xdg-user-dirs-update, it all started coming good.

So thank you very much for your patience with me and my stupidity.