Comment 24 for bug 886667

@Gaetano
The source package is nautilus.
You can either use the patch or update the source manually as it's just one line of code to be added in the source for nautilus-desktop-icon-view.c.

Yes, you have to compile it using e.g
$ debuild -us -uc
to get .deb-packages

Check this example if you're in doubt how to compile it:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/21225/how-to-apply-a-patch-to-indicator-applet

As an alternative you can use my ppa to get the patched version:

$ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:bowmore/pubtest
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gir1.2-nautilus-3.0 libnautilus-extension1a nautilus nautilus-data

and then remove the ppa with
$ sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:bowmore/pubtest

This version also includes logged messages in syslog of any unreasonable top margin values and looks like this:

Mar 26 11:18:42 dtop1 [DEBUG] nautilus-desktop-icon-view: icon_container_set_workarea: top margin ERROR, top = 300

meaning that the source module (file) nautilus-desktop-icon-view.c has a function icon_container_set_workarea () that detects any unreasonable top margin values, here equals 300 pixels. The patch then sets the top margin to 0. I've also moved the backward/forward arrows in the nautilus toolbar to the left of the location field making it easy to visualize that the patched version of nautilus is running. However, no guarantees that I will keep the ppa updated for newer versions.