Desktop icons going walkabout

From: Trent SC (trent_at_invalid.invalid)
Date: 03/01/05 

Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 18:07:29 -0000

My father's mongrel PC with XP Pro (SP2) is behaving oddly, in that about ½
the desktop icons aren't showing up properly.

The icons for My Computer, IE, OE, Recycle Bin and the shortcut to his
documents folder are all ok, but shortcuts to Word, Excel, Britannica are
only displaying the little arrow in the lower left corner and the text, as
is a Word document that was saved directly to the desktop.

We've tried System Restore to no avail, and I'm rather scratching my head on
this one. It's a fairly recent clean installation of XP and he hasn't
installed anything apart from AVG updates since I set it up for him. All he
did yesterday afternoon was write one short letter and run a defrag.

Any suggestions on what I might suggest from a distance and over the phone
to a relative computer novice to fix this?

TIA

Relevant Pages

  • Re: my docs
    ... you will need to clear out your documents folder and/or ... figure which is causing this behavior. ... Good luck! ... > desktop icons, the pc stalls a bit and kinda refreshes, and everything ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Logging into an existing user account
    ... not the usual desktop icons for the user account. ... no documents in the My Documents folder that appears on the desktop. ... The Documents and Settings folder contains a folder with the User Account ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)