Locking Icon positions on desktop

This has happened before, several times.

Yesterday I had a crash. When Win XP restarted all my icons were scrambled to the left. So I spent 20 minutes putting them back to where I thought most of them went (I have a grouped layout).

Then after about 3 hours of "quality time" with my PC we had a general power failure that lasted about 5 minutes. So I switched off the PC so it would not restart when the power came back and found my way upstairs as it was close to dinner (gas stoves are precious).

This morning on IPL the icons were back on the left again.

20 min later I had another layout finished. This time I did a powerdown restart to preserve the arrangement.

So my question after all this is:

Is there any way to lock the desktop icon layout that will not be compromised by a crash or power failure?

 

JGB,

There may be a way to lock the icons but it takes modifying the registy.

** DO NOT MODIFY THE REGISTRY WITHOUT BACKING UP THE REGISTY 1st **

Arrange the icons and Go to Start -> Run -> Type in REGEDIT
Navigate to: KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Right-click in the right pane and select New, DWORD Value name NoSaveSettings and press the Enter key. Right-click on the new NoSaveSettings item and select Modify. Enter 1 in the Value data box.

** DO NOT MODIFY THE REGISTRY WITHOUT BACKING UP THE REGISTY 1st **

 

I don't know if there's a way to lock them or not but you can make things a bit easier on yourself. When I ran XP I used a little app called Icon Restore for this type of thing. It's just one dll file. Doesn't really run until you use it other than the fact that the dll gets loaded at startup. You might want to take a look at it. Works great.

Oh, also, you might want to also download the uninstall file. There is no uninstall for it in Windows once you install it but you can use that to get rid of it if you decide it's not for you. The link for the uninstall file is below the download link for the install program.

 

Thanks guys,

I'll try them.