Victor Mangra

I couldn't find any different way to resolve this issue...

The way it worked for me was as follows:

1) Press CTRL+ALT+Del and then click on "Task Manager";

2) Go to the "Processes" tab and end the process "explorer.exe";

3) Go to the tab "Programs" and click "New Task". Type "cmd" (without the quotes, obviously) on the box and press "Enter".

4) You should see the MS-DOS prompt C:\Users\Your Name\>

5) Type "cd desktop" (again, without quotes) and press "Enter";

6) Type "dir *.exe" (no quotes) and press Enter. A file tree with all the .exe files will appear. Find the one you want to delete and then type:

del the_file_you_want_to_delete.exe

7) Type exit (the black dos prompt windows will close)

8) Go back to Task Manager and click "New Task". Then, type "explorer.exe" and press Enter. Your desktop will appear again (hopefully, without the file).

Note: Sometimes, you can delete .exe files from your desktop "simply" browsing your Windows Explorer and deleting from there. However, there is some bug that won't let you do it most times. If this doesn't work, try the steps above which will work for sure.

You can try a reinstall as well. It seems that this "Windows philosophy" which tells you to "format when there is a problem" is very true. There is no fix to this as far as I am concerned and Microsoft doens't even seem to be aware of this. As this issues doesn't come up as a "system error", Vista doesn't ask you to send a report to MS. Therefore, this is a bug that will always be a bug (unless a few thousand people report this error manually).

Also, I am thinking that it has something to do with the shortcut overlay key, on Windows' registry. I have added a key to the registry and the problem appeared (I can't be bothered to undo the changes). If that is the case, MS will not consider this as an error, as there was a change made to the registry deliberately.