>If windows is improperly shut down, or explorer crashes then
>the icon positions are not saved, and upon next reboot it
>places known icons in their locations, then stacks the rest
>in an auto-arranged grid.

I suspect there may be something in explorer not right - and I do wonder if 
it is related to the corporate anti-virus system (we use Sophos). When you 
exit a program it seems to refresh the whole desktop and the most recently 
used icon then becomes the last icon.

>IIRC there was a command you could use that would cause explorer
>to save the current state (including icon positions) so that if
>it later crashed then it would place them correctly.

Yeah, I haven't worked out how Explorer manages to locate where they should 
be, seeing the "user interface" (when you "open" the user desktop file) is 
just like any other folder. Obviously there is something else happening 
behind the scenes.

>Your best bet is to either
>1) live with it (annoying if you have more than 20 icons or so)

What I am currently doing.

>2) Set them all up and then restart the computer (may not work)

Tried this, and they all moved around (except the basic windows ones).

>3) Use one of the _many_ freely available programs designed to
>resolve this problem

Not sure I am going to get that pernickety about it. It is just rather 
frustrating that it used to be stable, and now moves around. The suggestion 
someone else had about some setting may be worth trying to follow up though. 

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