Since a few days the filebrowser sometimes shows no files.
Same here. I get this error, repeated several times: amarok(9790)/kdeui (KIconLoader) KIconLoader::loadIcon: No such icon "inode-directory"
You should state your KDElibs version. It seems to have an influence on the behaviour.
kde trunk compiled: Fri Oct 3 17:41
KDE 4.1.69 (KDE 4.2 >= 20081009)
I am almost certain that this is a regression caused in KDirLister/KDirOperator, as there have been no reported problems with users of kdelibs 4.1. Reassigning to kdelibs.
David Faure, Lydia and me talked about this on IRC and it looks like a configuration problem (missing iconset / iconset not found in search path). So this was probably not a real bug, and anyway it doesn't seem to be reproducible.