A Mystery: what is deleting my Icon Settings?

[Frank J. Lhota]

On my home computer, I alternate between different desktop themes. For the
last several months, whenever I log in to my home machine, the system
desktop icons (i.e., "My Documents", "My Computer", "My Network Places", and
"Recycle Bin") frequently display as the default icons. The other elements
of my desktop theme (the wallpaper, sounds, cursors, etc.) are retained
between login sessions, but I have less than a 50% chance of seeing my most
recent icon settings on login.

When I switch to another account, then return to my account, the icons are
frequently reverted to their default state. Again, this does not happen all
the time.

I have part of the answer to this problem. I have found the registry
settings for the system icons. Whenever this problem occurs, regedit shows
that these settings have been deleted. The problem appears to be that
something occasionally deletes my icon settings. This raises the question of
what is deleting my icon settings, and how do I stop it?

This may not be a serious problem, but I would still like to solve it, if
for no other reason than to make sure that this is not an indicator of an
even larger problem.

I use Norton Anti-Virus and Ad-Aware religiously. I defreg and do a full
scan for viruses at least once a week. I probably do Ad-Aware scans even
more often than that. Recently, I started to do my full virus scans in safe
mode. AFAIK my machine is not infected with anything, although it is running
slower lately. Any helpful advice for diagnosing this problem would be most
appreciated.

 

[David Candy]

Probably your NVidia driver, roll back to an earlier driver.

 

[Frank J. Lhota]

Probably your NVidia driver, roll back to an earlier driver.

By George, I did update my NVidia driver around the time this problem turned
up! How far back should I go?

 

[David Candy]

I don't know. A roll back will take you to the version before you updated. I believe it's not so much the driver but the other crap nvidia now installs.

 

[Frank J. Lhota]

First of all, my previous post really should have included a word of thanks
for your speedy help in diagnosing the problem. So let me extend my
(belated) thanks for your rapid responce to my problem.

I've always wondered whether the added NVidia utilities might be causing a
performance hit, so I did a quick web search for "NVidia" and "Desktop
Icons", and I found an alternate theory that this newsgroup might find
interesting:

http://forums.myispfinder.org/showthread.php?t=2243

The gist of this forus thread is that Windows itself may be the culprit,
which explains why regmon does not pick up the deletion.

 

[David Candy]

I don't think so. While it's not impossible for ATI to do the same thing, things like this are nearly always done by programs or drivers. For instance turning off NVidia in Services stops it happening.