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Every few days, all the icons on my Win7 desktop rearrange themselves. Usually they move to the left edge of the screen. I laboriously move all the icons back to where I like them, and 3-10 days later, they all shift left again. I've found no pattern or event that might cause this -- but it's very annoying!
I've got Win7 build 7100 running on a Dell Latitude D830 laptop. Totally standard hardware and very little non-Microsoft software. In short, it's a pretty clean system.
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.
To supplement Reyas.M.I.'s answer, Under View is the option to select the icon size, Auto arrange icons and Align icons to grid. The Sort by option includes Name, Size, Item type and Date modified. I suggest you check both View and Sort by.
Corrine, Microsoft MVP (Consumer Security). This posting is provided "AS IS" without warranty, and confers no rights.
Check whether "Auto Arrange" checked. To check this, right click on desktop and select "Arrange icons by".
I hope this helps.
Thanks and Regards, Reyas...
Ditto, except that on my system the resolution changes almost everytime the computer sleeps or switches users. It is really frustrating.
I've been having the same problem on my Windows 7 Pro x64 OS. A select few of the icons reposition themselves at various times. One fix I used was to rename the file/folder name of the icon (e.g., by putting a "-" as first character). That seemed to work...but for a better solution I went with IconRestorer, which can backup and restore desktop icon layouts, and provide 64-bit support.
I'm going to have to rely on my memory a bit here, but I'm pretty sure the location of icons on the screen is stored in the user's profile, and that the periodic rearrangement isn't because auto-arrange is turned on, but because the previous shut-down caused Windows to believe the profile was bad, corrupted, etc. So, on reboot Windows looks for a previous profile, pops it and the "new" old icons arrangement and the result is that your hard-worked screen locations revert to some old one. If there was any rhyme or reason to the icon arrangement I'd suspect Windows was doing the thinking on the rearrangement, but they're not suddenly all clustered to the left side of the screen, arranged alphabetically by name or location. On the other hand they don't appear to be random either.
Lot's of Windows stuff gets its arrangement or visibility from "Most Recently Used" sorts-of stored arrangements, and when the latest MRU is perceived to be corrupted, the next most recent MRU is used. This stuff used to be fairly easy to maintain in XP, but with Vista and beyond so much is now considered "Operating-System-critical" that you can't even go in and clean out the old ____ because Windows security doesn't think you know what you're doing, and won't let you delete files it thinks are system-critical. With XP the workaround was to rename the file (which was permitted, regardless of how byzantine this sounds) whereas you couldn't have deleted the file even as admin. Once renamed, however, the new file name was easily deleted because its name was no longer on the system-critical list of file names.
I know this doesn't help with the rearrangements, but at least you can stop thinking or worrying that it's auto-arrange or something like that. Profiles have been the bane of system administrators since Win95, and apparently continue to vex users 15 years later. "The more things change, the more they stay the same..."
Paul
