Desktop Icons rearanged on booting (I'm desperate)

[Lod]

Hi all,
My problem is that a while ago I installed a program that on booting my desktop icons got aranged Ie; everything on the desktops left got neatly placed on the right and everything on the right got scrambled all around the desktop. The problems main signature seems to happen when a program that has just been installed requires a boot to complete the install. Unfortunately it's doing it on programs that I have never had problems with.

I have since formated 5 times tried the settings of no save settings and dissabled fast shutdown and restored the reg on numerous times. but it continues.

I am currently on the 5th format and it has not happend for three days since, but it will when I forget to back the reg (Murphy's law) for due to this I have to back the reg everytime the machine boots correctly.

To make the long story short 4 Antivirus apps also could not find anything even one that also scans for joke programs.

So my question is does anybody know of or has heard of this happening and how do I fix it permanently, as well as which is/are the reg keys that control the desktop icons positions so that I can only back just those keys.

Believe me when I say your help is very much appriciated and I thank you for your help, For this is driving me nuts.

Lod

[brentadams]

What os are you running?

[Lod]

I forgot about that, its Win98 fe with all updates and IE5,5

I have since narrowed it down to it being caused by the second monitor. The main monitor 17" runs at 1280 res and the second 15" at 1024 res and it seems that if a shutdown is initiated by a program it shuts down too fast or so, which on start when Windows initiates the monitors the icons get bounced when trying to accertain the desktop.

Unfortunately once they get bounced the only way to get them to stay in thier respective places on boot up is by restoring the registry. So the effect of the problem seems to affect the desktop registry settings permanently.

Would you know which registry settings control the desktop icons position? I would like to save these keys.
Any ideas why would it be permanant? you would think that once I set the desktop icons back and booted they would stay, but they don't. As said the only fix is restoring the reg.

Thanks for your help.

[brentadams]

you don't have to restore the registry. I did this on every lab machine at a local college. All you have to do is restore user.dat. That's all you have to restore. It's been a long time since I've done it, but if that doesn't work, there are a few .inf files in the root dir. Restore those, too. I think to get it to work the way I am thinking, however, you have to restore both. Hope this help.

[Lod]

Thanks for your help, but I may as well just stick to restoring the reg untill I find the actual keys.

Thanks again.

[surefire]

try deleting the file sheliconcache and rebooting