arranging desktop icons

In XP service pack 2.

Right click anywhere on your desk top that is not an icon.

The menu that appears has an option to Arrange icons by... further sub menu items such as auto arrange, arrange alphabetically arrange by size type etc.

arranging desktop icons
The options that show up are Name, Size, Type, Modified; Auto Arrange, Align to Grid. I can't find a common thread in any of these except alignment to grid. There are no sub-menus.

If auto arrange has a tick next to it deselect it. do the same with align to grid

Then proceed to arrange your icons where you like.

Next time you shut down your computer it "should" save your settings.

arranging desktop icons
Thanks. Auto arrange wasn't selected, but I checked it, and then unchecked it, and eveything seems ok.

This is one item that Microsoft screwed the pooch on IMO. Back in the day IBM had an Operating System called "OS/2" that had been developed in conjunction with Microsoft. Many of the features that later appeared in WindowsNT and then Windows2000 and WindowsXP were originally developed for OS/2.

One of the features that was never brought over was one where you could setup your desktop icons wherever you wanted them on the screen and save their positions as a custom desktop.

I used to have all my system function in the top left corner, my standard application in the top right corner, utilities in the botton left and documents in the bottom right corner. It made finding things extremely easy.

I've never understoiof why this wasn't incorportaed into the Windows OSs.

I can't offer anything with regard to tweaking the O/S, but another option that I stumbled on quite a few years ago (when I seemingly experienced a similar problem), was to just use a freeware program called IconSaver.

It has always worked well under both Windows 98 and Windows XP. You just save your existing desktop icon configuration and if the configuration is ever lost or corrupted, through whatever process, you can just toggle the icon restore - and you're restored. Locating the program somewhere for downloading under its name is pretty easy.