Restoring Desktop Icon Location After Mistake

[drfsupercenter]

Hi,

I have two identical computer monitors running in 1080p each using a NVIDIA GTX460SE video card. I have all the icons on the left monitor (as in, the main one), but had them arranged specially and on all parts of the screen, not just the leftmost area.

When moving home from college for holiday break, I plugged the monitors in backwards (as in, monitor 1 to monitor 2's jack and vice versa) - so I unplugged both and corrected it.

At some point, Windows freaked out and alphabetized all of my icons and shoved them over to the left.

Now, my ordinary routine for fixing the broken alignment is a simple System Restore, as it does keep the desktop icon locations. However, on each of the 5 restore points I have, it keeps giving me these errors that a certain file couldn't be found in each (not the same one each time).

I'm curious if there's a way to manually grab the desktop icon location out of the system restore backups if that's ALL I need and not the entire restore image. I know the backups are in C:/System Volume Information, but I have NO idea where desktop icon locations are stored... I would have assumed it was in desktop.ini but nope!

I can't system restore at all... and installing the third-party solutions don't help as the icons are already screwed up. If it's just a registry key or file somewhere, in theory I could extract it from one of those backups and use it?
Or, does anybody else have any other suggestions?

In the future, though, I'll use that one third-party solution where you can just right click and backup the locations.

 

[Ztruker]

Icon placement is stored in the registry somewhere. You could go through the gyrations of copying the registry files from a restore point, but it's not worth the effort.

Install the icon placement program (I use DesktopOK) then arrange them as you want and save it. Then restore is always a mouse click away.

 

[drfsupercenter]

Well, do you know WHERE in the registry?

Honestly, extracting a file is easier than rearranging tons of desktop icons. IMO at least.

 

[Ztruker]

No, I don't. All I can suggest is to use Google to search for ideas.

If you have a lot if icons (that would drive me nuts!) maybe you should create some folders to hold related ones and simplify your desktop a bit? The you could arrange them and save using DesktopOK or similar program?