Applications list entirely empty because of corrupt .desktop file

[kruthers64]

My mintmenu lost the list of applications, identical to this forum post:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=384302

It turned out that a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications that I had been editing acquired a slight corruption, (a null byte appended to the end in case that matters). This .desktop file still worked fine for a panel launcher or even double-clicking in caja, but it broke mintmenu.

I only found the problem by running desktop-file-validate on it, which reported:
example.desktop: warning: file contains lines that are not UTF-8 encoded. There is no guarantee the validator will correctly work.

Fixing the desktop file and running mintmenu --reset fixed the problem.