Unused Desktop Icons wizard

[Rojo Habe]

Whenever the little speech bubble pops up telling me I have unused desktop
icons, I launch the wizard and let it clean things up for me. Trouble is,
it wipes out each icon for ALL USERS, not just the current user. this means
that any user can end up inadvertently deleting someone else's icons.
Surely this can't be right? Is there a control panel setting somewhere to
adjust this behaviour?

 

[Rojo Habe]

Whenever the little speech bubble pops up telling me I have unused desktop
icons, I launch the wizard and let it clean things up for me. Trouble is,
it wipes out each icon for ALL USERS, not just the current user. this
means that any user can end up inadvertently deleting someone else's
icons. Surely this can't be right? Is there a control panel setting
somewhere to adjust this behaviour?

Well I've managed to deduce that the shortcuts in question are deleted
because they're in '\All Users\Desktop' rather than '\Username\Desktop'.
The same thing happens if you manually delete any shortcuts that live in
this folder. You'd think Windows would be smart enough to recognise this.
All it needs is a to automatically copy any shortcuts in this folder to all
the other users' desktops before deleting them. I can't believe this hasn't
come up before.

The problem arises when someone else runs the Desktop Cleanup Wizard and you
suddenly find your shortcuts are missing. You can't restore them because
they're now in that person's 'Unused Desktop Shortcuts' folder so you have
to re-create them. Not normally a problem, but some software installs
shortcuts with command line switches. If you don't know the exact text of
the original shortcut and you can't restore from a backup volume you might
end up having to reinstall the software. Which plonks the shortcut back on
the other user's desktop just ready to be picked clean again in another
sixty days.