desk top icon spacing

[Tim]

I have 4 laptops and several desk tops all with XP Pro on
them. One of the desk tops spaces the icons so close
together that they overlap quite a bit. Changing the auto
arrange and align to grid does nothing. I cannot seem to
find any way to change this. I purchased 3 new laptops
at the same time that are set up the same way. 2 are
fine, one has the wierd spacing.

Any ideas?

 

[Jerry]

I would assume it is a hardware problem and ask the tech support people at
the manufacturer.

 

[R. McCarty]

There are Registry keys called IconSpacing that determine
that layout. The default value is -1125.

 

[Guest]

So far the replies by Jerry and R.McCarty show you how little people know about XP. This is a simple thing to fix. Right click on your desktop and then click properties\appearance tab\advanced button and look at the drop down list under "item"(click the arrow to the right of this line to get the drop down list). Click on "icon spacing: horizontal" or in your case "icon spacing: vertical" to highlight it and open the options up just to the right of this line. In this case the "size:" box will open for you to set. Depending on the screen resolution you have, a setting of around 35-50 will do nicely. While you are at it take a look at all the available things here you can change. The list is quite large and gives you a chance to alter the looks of XP to suit you. Window colours, font colours, border colours, font style\colour\size and so on. I suggest you click your way around the various tabs that you get when you right click on your desktop then click properties to see what you can do. You would be amazed by the eXPeriance. {:~)

 

[Steve Nielsen]

Yes the default value is -1125 but it would be helpful if you could give
the exact registry location, don'tchya think? There are several of them:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

And then more cryptic ones relating to (presumably) individual users,
such as:

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-##########-##########-##########-####\Control
Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

My advice to the OP - search the entire registry for "IconSpacing" and
check the values for each of the keys you find.

Steve