Icon appears on desktop out of nowhere

eknirb said:

so you mean if the program updates itself, it pops the icon onto the desktop?

Yes, some do that. Not sure when and why but I had that happen to me too.

I can think of several programs that re-install desktop icons when they auto-update. Google Earth certainly does. iTunes does.

As whs stated, some of these things get installed with other installations. You have to be careful if you don't want "extras" installed. Seems everything I install wants me to install Chrome and make it my default browser.

I'm not sure about others but, if you don't want Google auto-updating, go to Start Menu and type in "Task Scheduler." From there, you can disable any Google auto-updates.

JZS said:

FTR, after installing several windows updates earlier today, and rebooting my machine, I now have a desktop icon for "Norton Internet Security" which was not there before the reboot. I am running NIS on this machine, but just as was mentioned in the OP, the NIS desktop icon appeared out of nowhere.

Yeah, NIS does that after nearly every NIS update. Just delete it.