Context: Xubuntu 14.04.3, xfce4 desktop, xfe-1.41.
Symptom : Dialog box stating 'Unable to load some icons. Please check your icons path.'
History : xfe-1.37 installed from ubuntu repo using Synaptic, works without symptoms. Downloaded 1.41. After running './configure', 'make', and 'sudo make install', running xfe gives rise to the symptom above. Attempted to resolve problem by explicitly running the icons make. This did not resolve the problem.
Partial Workaround: Create symlinks in /usr/share/xfe/icons pointing to corresponding newly created directories in /usr/local/share/xfe/icons. This eliminates the Dialog box on startup of xfe, but does not eliminate it for some other operations, eg right-click, Edit .
Adding configure log.
OK, this turns out to be all down to the fact that the .config/xfe/xferc for the previous version was not deleted, and contained the wrong icon path and also wrong file association info ( referring to 'xfwrite' etc ). Therefore Not a Bug :).
OK, so I close the bug.