# Why Do Desktop Icons Rearrange Themselves



## alnuwer (May 12, 2011)

Lately, when I boot my PC in the morning, _sometimes _find my desktop icons (short cuts) rearranged - they end up in a matrix of orderly columns and rows. It's been happening now for a few months on what appears to be on a random basis - maybe every few days (I power up every morning).

At first I thought it happened when MS does an update, but last time it happened, I checked their update history, and no update at that time. So what else might cause this annoyance?

Running Windows10 Pro on a HP Compaq Pro 6300 Desk Top


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## flavallee (May 12, 2002)

You possibly have *View - Auto arrange icons* selected.

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## jenae (Mar 17, 2013)

Hi, I suspect you already have auto arrange unchecked, If you play games, then sometimes the game will change the screen resolution, this causes windows to re arrange the icons, also some documents will be freshly loaded again causing icons to be rearranged. Not a lot you can do about this, unless you can find a setting in the game to change this behavior. Also a failing video card (or older driver), could be at play, in this case get the latest video card drivers from the manufacturers web site.

If there is corruption in the Icon cache then you will also see this problem. Go to search and type command prompt, right click on the returned command prompt and select "run as administrator" an elevated cmd prompt will open. Copy and paste each one of these 6 cmds, pressing enter after each cmd. Your desktop will go blank and the last cmd will cause your computer to restart immediately.

ie4uinit.exe -show 
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F 
DEL /A /Q "%localappdata%\IconCache.db" 
DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"
shutdown /r /f /t 00


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## alnuwer (May 12, 2011)

flavallee said:


> You possibly have *View - Auto arrange icons* selected.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------


View - Auto arrange icons is not selected. Thanks for your quick reply!


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## alnuwer (May 12, 2011)

jenae said:


> Hi, I suspect you already have auto arrange unchecked, If you play games, then sometimes the game will change the screen resolution, this causes windows to re arrange the icons, also some documents will be freshly loaded again causing icons to be rearranged. Not a lot you can do about this, unless you can find a setting in the game to change this behavior. Also a failing video card (or older driver), could be at play, in this case get the latest video card drivers from the manufacturers web site.
> 
> If there is corruption in the Icon cache then you will also see this problem. Go to search and type command prompt, right click on the returned command prompt and select "run as administrator" an elevated cmd prompt will open. Copy and paste each one of these 6 cmds, pressing enter after each cmd. Your desktop will go blank and the last cmd will cause your computer to restart immediately.
> 
> ...


Yep, Auto arrange is un-checked, and I do not play _any _games. So I followed your suggestion on fixing the Icon cache. Since this is a random issue, I guess only time will tell if that fixed things. Stay tuned... and thanks for your reply!


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## jenae (Mar 17, 2013)

Hi, thanks to Flavallee, for pointing this out, the forum has trucated the cmds, there are only 5. DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*" is one cmd, not two as it appears here, you can safely run the cmds again as cmd prompt would have ignored the truncated cmd anyway.


1. ie4uinit.exe -show 
2. taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F 
3. DEL /A /Q "%localappdata%\IconCache.db" 
4.DEL /A /F /Q"%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"
5. shutdown /r /f /t 00


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## alnuwer (May 12, 2011)

jenae said:


> Hi, thanks to Flavallee, for pointing this out, the forum has trucated the cmds, there are only 5. DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*" is one cmd, not two as it appears here, you can safely run the cmds again as cmd prompt would have ignored the truncated cmd anyway.
> 
> 1. ie4uinit.exe -show
> 2. taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
> ...


So what am I missing here? These 5 commands look identical to the 5 in your initial post.


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## jenae (Mar 17, 2013)

Hi, they are, it's just I said there were 6 cmds in my original post, this follow up was just to make sure you got it right, which it appears you did, otherwise you would have received an error message, so well done you.


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