Moving files between Thunar windows works fine, as does copying files to the desktop. The problem occurs when you try and MOVE a file to the desktop (from Thunar) by holding shift (which changes the behaviour from copy to move) at which point the file move will fail with the message:

"Error opening file '/home/bhodgetts/Desktop/akram.log/akram.log'. No such file or directory."

As you can see it seems to be trying to copy the file into a folder with the same name as the file you're trying to move. No idea why it's doing that (it should just be moving it to the Desktop).

Also not sure why it defaults to copy rather than move when transferring files to the desktop when they are on the same filesystem (moving files between Thunar windows defaults to move unless it's on a different filesystem, as you would expect).

This may be an upstream issue though as there's a report here for the exact same issue in Ubuntu - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfdesktop4/+bug/825137


Additional info:
Version: extra/xfdesktop 4.8.2-2

Desktop is definied correctly:
cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"