Desktop icons won't stay in place

This is not a new problem, but I haven't seen a solution. I have a toshiba laptop running W7 hp x64 whose desktop icons will not stay where I place them. It also doesn't remember icon size.

I have tried:

• toggling settings such as align to grid, auto-arrange
• toggling desktop icons off and on
• turning off "allow themes to change icons"
• creating a new administrative account
• doing post-malware type repairs on icons
• doing a SFC
• installing SP1
• and finally, I just did a repair install.

And none of these solved the problem.

The only thing that comes close is doing a Refresh on the desktop. With a refresh, the new icon locations are locked in. That's nice, but subsequent moves are not remembered.

I would even do a fresh install to get rid of this nuisance, but there are progs on here that I don't want to lose.

I think there must be a specific registry setting somewhere that governs this function. Does anyone know where it is?

Have you tried locking taskbar?

I'll try locking the taskbar, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to achieve. I currently have the taskbar on autohide, as I always do.

I ran MBAM and it found a remnant of a PUP. Now, occasionally a moved icon will stay in place. Maybe one time out of seven, with no discernible pattern.

I also reset all registry and file permissions. I then brought over the registry key from a similar machine. None of this did anything. From watching the registry, the key is only changed when F5 is hit. Whatever is supposed to automatically write to the key during shutdown is not doing so. This, despite a repair install??

I would resort to a third part utility if it saved icon positions automatically. I can already do it manually via F5.

Thanks. :)

Sigh. I guess marking Solved doesn't post what you have written. One detailed post down the drain. Maybe the Solved button shouldn't be with the posting commands, eh, VBuletin?

Anyway, I began to run into Task Scheduler problems due to "Read failure". Tasks long since deleted were trying to run. I traced it back to a task I had deleted in TS, but whose file still existed at system32\tasks. When I deleted that orphaned file, the whole host of TS errors disappeared immediately.

What's more, testing the hunch that TS is responsible for locking the desktop icons at shutdown, I found that now the DT icons behaved perfectly. Problem solved!

Hallelujah!

Um... actually I also had this problem but I just hit Refresh a couple of times and it got fine.