Half of my desktop icons are missing!

<_< Turned on the puter this morning, and about half of my desktop icons are missing when logged in under my name. One of my teenage sons has World of Warcraft (online play only) and has been playing it constantly since school let out (logged in as me, of course)…may not have anything to do with it, but thought I'd bring that up. Have run Defrag, Ad-Aware and Spybot (which can't update, BTW), MS Anti-Spyware, and AVG Free Edition under both Normal Mode and Safe Mode….DSO Exploit was found and removed. I can still access all of my programs when going through Start…just don't understand what happened. How do I check to see what happened and get my icons back? Not the worst thing that ever happened to me on a Monday morning, but still! Can anybody help me? Thanks in advance!

In XP there is folder in documents and settings for each user as well as one called "all users". This applies to the start menu as well. What is displayed for each user is a combination of what is your users desktop and start menu and what is in the all users desktop and start menu folders.

If the Shortcuts in question were in the all users desktop folder and another user deleted them from their desktop, they would disappear from yours as well.

If you right click on the start button and choose Explore All Users, you will be able to explore this structure and see what I'm talking about.

To get your shortcuts back and make sure others can't delete them, you could create new ones and make sure they are in your personal folder rather than the common folder.

Generally I only keep shortcuts that everyone uses in the common folder and everything else in the personal ones to avoid what happened to you. It also generally leads to much less cluttered desktops for everyone.

Also, I believe that the DSO exploits in Spybot is a bug that has been fixed in the latest version. If you don't have the latest versions of your protection programs be sure to get them!!

Cheers,

m

My son had used the Desktop Wizard to clear those icons. I didn't know until he woke up yesterday afternoon …told him to NEVER do that again. Got some of the icons back, will work on it some more today. 'Problem' fixed…thank you, maynard!!

My pleasure! m