WinXP "dead" desktop icons

[sysdrk]

I have a friend who is running WinXP and I am trying to solve a problem
for him. He has a bunch of desktop icons and most of them do not work.
If I right-click on a dead icon, I get the Display Properties dialog
screen, as if the icon were not present. If I left-click on a dead
icon, nothing happens, whereas on a live icon the text under the icon
gets highlighted. While most of the icons are dead, a few are alive.

Can someone suggest what I should look for to resolve this problem?

Denis

 

[WinXP_Powered]

I have a friend who is running WinXP and I am trying to solve a problem
for him. He has a bunch of desktop icons and most of them do not work.
If I right-click on a dead icon, I get the Display Properties dialog
screen, as if the icon were not present. If I left-click on a dead
icon, nothing happens, whereas on a live icon the text under the icon
gets highlighted. While most of the icons are dead, a few are alive.

Can someone suggest what I should look for to resolve this problem?

Denis

Try these in order and 1 of them will solve your problem:

1. Right click on the Desktop and select Refresh.

2. Right click on the Desktop and select Arrange Icons By >, then select
Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

3. If those don't work, then it's time for TweakUI. You can find it on
the XP CD under the \Tools folder, or you can do a search on MS for
the the latest version. You'll find PowerToys--of which TweakUI is
one of them. It can clean up dead icons.

John

 

[sysdrk]

I finally got a chance to work on my friend's PC again yesterday.
These first 2 steps didn't work. The third step, using TweakUI worked
in a sense. The real problem is that the desktop background, which was
a photo of this guy's grandchild, got messed up. Somehow the desktop
icons got embedded in the photo and were no longer actual icons (also
verified by looking in the Desktop directory where the shortcuts
exist). It's as if my friend did a screen capture at some point and
made the screen capture his desktop background, but I doubt my friend
really knows how to do this and it doesn't seem like this is something
that would happen inadvertently.

Anyway, changing the desktop background to something else "removed" all
the apparent icons and only left the real icons. Then I used TweakUI
to cleanup for good measure. This wasn't the ideal solution but it
left my friend with real icons and I showed him how to create shortcuts
so he could rebuild his icon list.

Of course, it would be nice to know how this situation could have been
created but it's rather a moot point now, unless it happens again...

Denis