Yeah, Finder still has a few bugs, but I'm not one of those people who points them out as a critical reason to give it up and purge it from OS X. (Hey, they do exist). Too bad about the demo though.

For the future, there's a handy little contextual menu that might have fixed this problem: Rainer Brockerhoff's Nudge. AFAIK it's basically a GUI wrapper around the Unix touch command, but it usually causes Finder to update a folder. It's had less consistent results with the Desktop, but it may still have worked for you. I've used to fix the Stuffit bug where the uncompressed folder appears empty.