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These icons are not short cuts, but notepad files. Why are they there? How can they be eliminated?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Hi AntipodeamRJ,
Enabling the Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) setting in Folder Options hides the two Desktop.ini files, as well. To access the Folder Options, open Windows Explorer, click Organize, click Folder and Search Options and select the View tab.
Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows Desktop Experience]
Thank you Ramesh, so much. This worked.
All the best from Dublin
From way back, I just delete them. Windows 8 also.
I have had no problems. I don't see any useful purpose they serve.
People... Stop randomly deleting these files or worrying about them. Desktop.ini files (as the ini hints to for those familiar) are configuration files used by windows to do per folder configurations.
If you do delete these there also is no reason to worry, as that will just reset your folder configuration, for that particular folder, back to default. If you want custom folder configurations, then keep them, if you don't then delete them. If you don't want to see them then disable the viewing of hidden files and folders... if you want to have hidden files visible then you can use this command to mark the file as a system file, so it will only show if you also choose to make system files visible:
attrib +s +h <path\directory name> /s /d
The point is that a lot of people (other threads, other forums) want to see system files--but not on the Desktop....:-)....!