Hi,

I'm trying to track down which of the hundreds of programs I have installed that keeps auto arranging my desktop icons during start up I found that Winstep when it's starting up SEEMS to be the culprit. So if this is something it does do where can I find the settings to disable this feature as I don't want it to mess with my desktop icons.

Thanks so much
Richard

This has never happened here - not that there are many icons on my desktop anyway - and I don't think it's come up in the forum before. Winstep apps do not touch the desktop other than hiding or un-hiding the icons but that doesn't mess with their order.

It's likely that if you use a third party Virtual Windows utility, this could be the culprit. If you're not using one, but running Win 11, then I'd look to that perhaps.

I don't use any virtual desktops so yea, not sure what's going on. So so weird.

It certainly is. Unless anybody else knows any different, I suspect this may well be one of those intractable issues that could be caused by almost anything and that one just has to live with, alas.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Thanks just the same. I think I may have found part of the problem and it's def not WinStep..... I'm determined to figure it out but at least now I can take WinStep off of the list of probable's!

Make sure "auto arrange" is not set for the desktop icons.
You many also need to disable align icons to grid setting.

You can check these by right-mouse-button clicking on the desktop and select "view" from the pop-up menu. (See illustration attached)

This is a common and well known windows problem going back at least to the days of Windows XP.

Rather than typing all the steps in the process of elimination for troubleshooting this issue, here is a link to an article.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/desktop- ... ter-reboot

Please respond back with the outcome for other users and so we can review if these steps did not resolve your problem.

Yes, well aware of all that but what I did was Arrange Icons by Name so then they were all scrunched over on my big monitor and then I unchecked that and arranged them by hand. So that sort of worked. Now when I boot into Windows 11 I have them scrunched but then after about a second they are all where they need to be. I can live with that. Yea, this has been an ongoing issue with Windows since BEFORE Win XP from my recollection. I hate when their code teams mess things up after it's been fixed for most. Same with adding new files to the desktop, the new item will, every once in a while, move my fully left sided icons to make room for the new item rather than just putting it on closest to the already arranged icons. I have a little tool for that now called Desktop OK https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/DesktopOK. Still annoying to have to even use an app to fix what shouldn't be broken but it is what it is.

Indeed, well before XP. It was right from the beginning with NT4. No idea about Win 95 etc. as never went near any of them, but would think it must have been present there too.

So after more investigating I can confirm that when I arrange my icons in a certain way that when I quit Nexus and then restart it the icons are rearranged to the last configuration that Nexus has recorded. So now I need to figure out where that info is stored. I've been using something called DesktopOK to keep things where I need them to be but it's not been doing a very good job so now I have this pretty old program that still runs on Windows 11 called Iconoid which seems to work allot better.

https://www.sillysot.com/

I know currently there are issues with many end users that use Windows 11 where there are shifts in icon positions when new items are added to the desktop and while that's annoying at times having a dual monitor setup and having my icons in disarray is even more annoying and finding that Nexus is adding to the issue is quite off putting.

Nexus does not interfere with or record the position of desktop icons.

What *might* be happening is that if you have the dock set to reserve screen space (i.e. 'prevent maximized windows from covering the dock') this will also affect the space available for desktop icons (so desktop icons do not appear below toolbars that also reserve screen space, such as the Windows taskbar, etc), which in turn might force Windows to re-arrange them.

The order in which Windows does that is already entirely up to Windows itself - unless you are running a 3rd party application that has something to do with arranging icons on the destkop, of course - but Nexus is for sure not one of those.

I don't disbelieve you but again, if I turned off Nexus after arranging my icons they scatter all over the place, start up Nexus again and the icons go back into place. It's very strange. Esp if your program isn't the culprit.

The explanation is simple. It would seem that when you exit Nexus, Windows thinks it needs to re-arrange the icons, and when you start up Nexus again Windows 'remembers' the different icon arrangement and re-establishes it. So nothing to do with Nexus itself, just Windows reacting to it and to its absence.

Yea, there are some other folks with issues with their desktop icons doing weird things in Windows 11. Just glad it's not my favorite desktop Nexus .... just MS as usual messing things up for allot of their end users. I think the coders do it on purpose to mess with us and get us all riled up! LMAO

Trust me, I feel the same way. Sigh.