Vista - icons on desktop keep moving

Vista home premium with all the updayes

icons on the desktop keep moving back to the left. I un-check everything
under personalize. Have tried a couple things but nothing works. Help

John

At one point I even wrote my own "desktop icon position save/restore" program. But after years of messing with desktop icons, and also probably because I started to use themes, I decided to just get rid of them. I use RocketDock and I categorized my shortcuts into 6 folders that sit on RocketDock.

As you can see in the screen shot, with a double-height Taskbar and using icons instead of buttons for running apps, I have plenty of QuickLaunch. It's just a big hassle to mess with icons on the desktop. It's not worth it.

Thanks. I was posting for a friend. I use object dock plus with vista
and don't use desktop at all. From replies here and other places I
understand there just isn't any solution to the moving icon problem.
Seems strange after 2 revisions.

John

MilesAhead wrote:

Vista (and XP) has a built-in docking solution. No need to use Rocket Dock. Put all your icons into a folder on the desktop and then grab this folder and push it all the way into the top of your screen. There you release it (may need a couple of attempts). Now you have a dock that you can personalize by right clicking on it. I like the "hide" option. The folder you used will stay on the desktop as repository. Any new icon you drag into it will appear in the dock.

I did that with my six folder categories. I made a toolbar out of the enclosing folder. At least on my systems it was a struggle to grab hold of a corner to resize that folder once I made a toolbar out of it. RocketDock has the sizing built in with sliders to avoid that hassle. Plus the toolbar gets really big if you leave text enabled. If you disable text to keep it small, then you need to use custom icons for the categories to avoid constant waits for mouse hover to tooltip the text. RocketDock pops up large custom tooltips. Makes it easy to get the text description. Seems to run well on both 64 and 32 bit so I don't see the big hassle of using it. It takes a bit of time to set up but so does struggling with home made toolbar sizing. Plus if you put that toolbar on the Taskbar, you end up with a fold out menu that you have to travel the mouse over, which keeps closing if you go off the edge and is generally a pita.


To the OP if the friend really wants an Icon position restore I'd try Softpedia.com.
My own should work on 32 bit systems. You can get it from this page:
IconSet Desktop Icon Save Restore

(it's a freebie at your own risk no warranty software but I got the method out of Jeffrey Richter's Programming Windows book and it has worked on everything 32 bit since Win95.. if it doesn't work it's likely due to themes or you are running a 64 bit OS.)

I use VistaGlass and none of the other icon desktop software I've tried work on Vista64 probably due to hacking the shell DLLs to use Vista Purple theme, so I can't really test it on my machine. Chances are it may not work with themes. If the OS is 32 bit it may work. It's a shell extension so if the OS is 64 bit I wouldn't even bother with it. Just use another software with a Gui interface. There must be something free on Softpedia that works.

Trial and error is about it though.

btw if anyone does try my IconSet desktop icon save/restore make sure you have "auto arrange" for desktop icons disabled or it won't do anything except save the icon positions to a file. To restore the positions Auto Arrange has to be unchecked.

John wrote:You may have noticed that if the screen resolution changes (lower then
back to higher),the icons will move back to the left, or at least enough
to adjust for the different resolution. Maybe a video driver update or
change in resolution will stop the icons from moving.

Are they running any programs that might be changing the resolution,
such as games?

Your friend might check for any logs containing information about the
boot process or any warnings/errors on their system.

Clark