Icons Dissapearing in XP Home

A friend of mine from the gym asked me to help him recover the performance on his lap top windows XP Home computer. After turning off all the automatic updates and automatic everything, and trimming the startup items in the msconfig applet. And downoloading Spy Bot S&D and Ad Aware, I was able to recover most of the performance hassles he was experiencing. One thing however that happened I have no idea what to do to fix. He lost all of his desk top icons, after doing a help thing I tried enabling them the way I knew how, and the way the help menu said to do.

I have a question is there a secret tweak somewhere that can help with this, and I am not talking the obvious easy and common methods because I already tried those.

Thanks

 

There's no silver bullet that I know that will cure your problem. You aren't very specific about what the easy stuff was that you tried. I only know of one easy thing that hides ALL the Desktop icons. If you right-clicked the open Desktop, selected "Arrange Icons by" > and verified that "Show Desktop Icons" was checked, that's it. Perhaps uncheck that > apply > then recheck it.


Other than that, run SFC /scannow. Try System Restore to a point before the problem. Lastly, do a repair install of the OS.

For a test, are you able to create new Desktop icons? Does the Desktop folder exist at C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Desktop? Substitute user id for "Owner" as needed. Perhaps it would be informative to do a search for "Desktop" and see how many and where they are located on the drive. Focus on Folders only, not any files named desktop.xxx.

For comparison, I have:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop "
"C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop "
"C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Desktop "
"C:\Documents and Settings\Guest\Desktop "
"C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Desktop "

If you have multiple identities, you may have even more Desktop folders.

Try some of those things and report what you find. Save the Repair Install until all else fails. Try to be specific and complete when reporting so that you can be helped faster.

 

Thanks