Message "preparing your desktop".

This has shown up only within the last 2-3 days. After reading all the searches, all I did was do a restore. The default of 4 days, which displayed the recent windows update, seemed to be the culprit. Restarted with no apparent message as thread title. Keeping my fingers crossed. Good luck.

what you saw was windows giving you a message that after an update it was preparing your desktop, fairly normal depending on the update,
from what you say you did a system restore to the point just before the update ,therefor no update therefor no message, i would hazard a guess that if you install the updates again you will see the preparing your desktop message again.
but i wouldnt worry about it.