Duplicate Desktop Icons That Can't Be Deleted
Jun 3, 2012
I have numerous desktop icons (shortcuts, recycle bin, my documents folder) that I cannot delete. These icons are duplicates of the normal active icons that are either on my desktop or in the taskbar. The "unusable" icons aren't even recognized as being icons (so that if I right click on the desktop and select view and uncheck "show desktop icons", these icons remain). The icons cannot be selected (either right or left clicked), they cannot be moved, they do not highlight when moused over. Any suggestions on how to remove these? I've tried refreshing the desktop, rebooting several times, etc. They do not show up in the desktop folder within c:\users\<your user name>\desktop folder or the public desktop folder either.
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Jun 3, 2012
I was pinning some shortcuts to the task bar and removing these shortcuts from the desktop. Somehow I ended up with duplicate shortcuts and icons for each one that was originally on the computer desktop (even those I was not moving). These duplicates are not useable - they cannot be right clicked; they do not highlight when hovered over.
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Mar 7, 2012
I have an Acer Aspire as well as an HP Compaq Presario (both running Windows 7). Both have had this problem, though the HP only happens every now and then. Now, on the Acer when I save an image/file/folder/etc to the desktop and then decide to delete it, the content is deleted but the icon stays. I have tried rebooting the computer and it does not work. The only way I can get rid of them is to create a new image/document/folder with the same name and then using the "Shredder" to delete them permanently. The shredder however is only temporary, in fact I can only use it 14 more times.
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Jul 9, 2012
This morning I was arranging my desktop files and folders. As I clicked the command to sort by item type, suddenly I had duplicates of every file and folder as listed on my desktop. I even had two icons for the recycle bin! I started moving one of each of the duplicated files and folders into one of the duplicated recycle bins.
I rearranged the files and folders. I then emptied one of the recycle bins. I then clicked on the desktop to rearrange the files and folders. Suddenly almost everything else on my desktop disappeared! There were many files and folder on the desktop that are now gone, there are only 7 files and folders left. Is there any way I can recover these missing files and folders.
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Nov 25, 2010
I recently bought a second user machine from a colleague of mine. He re-installed Windows 7 so that everything was fresh and set up a new profile for me but I wasn't happy with the name of the profile that he had set up. Anyway to cut a long story short I created a new profile, copied the old files across and deleted the old profile I wasn't happy with.Everything is working fine and as it should be but I have a now have a couple of annoyances with a number of the programs that I have pinned to the taskbar and the start menu. For example when I pinned Firefox and Thunderbird to the taskbar it has named them as Firefox (2) and Thunderbird (2) as if they are duplicate programs/shortcuts. The same is true with some of the programs that I have pinned to the start menu. For example when I pinned CCleaner to the start menu Windows named it as CCleaner (2) even though it wasn't present in the first place. If I try to rename it to CCleaner (as it should appear) Windows tells me that there is already a program by that name pinned there and it asks me if I would like to rename it CCleaner (3).As far as I can tell it doesn't affect the performance of such programmes, its just really really frustrating. Would it have anything to do with the files that I copied across from my old profile?
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Jan 30, 2012
I have split my user profile onto a larger mirrored drive using a junction link. This works perfectly. However when viewing my personal folders I see multiple identical icons for favourites, links, my music etc. When I navigate to the actual area everything appears as it should be.If I try to delete one of these identical icons then both icons go to the recycle bin along with the files inside the relevant folder.Please see screen shot. I could recreate my profile and point the new profile at the relevant folders but setting up all my applications again will be a bit of a nightmare that I would like to avoid if possible.
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Sep 25, 2012
Basically, I've recently made the long-overdue transition from a 5-years old Windows XP machine to a brand-new Windows 7 one, which I've now had for a few days. Only yesterday, what appears to be a small bug reared it's ugly head.
Any file or folder created or moved onto my Desktop is automatically duplicated with another instance of that item. I say an instance because it's not simply a copy of that file, strictly-speaking, because when the duplicate is clicked, it opens the original file. So, I'm left with two instances of the same file on my Desktop. Just to make this clearer, suppose that, as an example, I created/moved a Plain Text file onto my Desktop. A duplicate of that item would then appear. When clicked, this duplicate opens the very same file, meaning therefore, that I have two instances of the same file. In case you were wondering, the duplicate is also not a shortcut to the original file: bringing up its properties, it has the exact same properties as the originally-created one does. I hope everyone's following me so far.
As well as the strange behaviour mentioned above, the bug also affects deleting files or folders in the Desktop. As I've already said, two instances of the file are created when a file is created on the Desktop. In the same way, deleting one instance of the file also deletes the other - but not straight away. It registers as deleted, but the Desktop has to be refreshed for the other instance to disappear.
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Aug 9, 2012
All my desktop and start icons have changed to paint icons on my other laptop. When I click on any of them they try to open in paint program.
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Dec 26, 2012
all my icons on desktop and computer have turned to notepad icons... and they open with some text on notepad... looking for a solution to go back to normal settings...
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Jan 8, 2013
At start up the icons are back on the grid and pushed to the left.
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Jan 5, 2013
Some of the icons normally showing what a program type is are missing now. I HAVE all the DESKTOP icons and those in the system tray. But in Windows Explorer lists or in Word Perfect and Word lists of file names, many of the small icons that normally appear next to a program's name, or showing what type of document or file it is, are now missing. Not all, just some. I have mostly open square boxes. It doesn't matter whether I'm looking at a list of files I've created, or looking at the items in various system folders: most are just empty open squares instead of the individual icons. I have Windows 7 64-bit OS , both Mozilla 17 and IE9 browsers.
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Jul 15, 2011
all my desktop icons turned into vlc icons,
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Jul 23, 2011
all icons changed to vlc(google talk,picasa,recycle bin etc when i was downloading a video from Internet i need a help
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Jul 30, 2011
All my desktop icons changed into vlc icons
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Apr 23, 2012
I've been looking around for something that can hide my desktop icons (or basically anything except my background & bottom navigation bar) if I'm not viewing the desktop.In other words, when I have a (not full screen) window open, I want to be able to see my desktop background but not the icons on it. When I "view" the desktop, or don't have anything on top of it, I want the icons back.
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Dec 19, 2012
Why all desktop icons appear in the Desktop folder but not on the desktop itself?I set my desktop to show the Recicle Bin icon only, but if I open the Desktop folder in Explorer they are all there: Computer, Control Panel, Libraries, Network, User's Files, and Recycle Bin.
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Nov 30, 2012
I foolishly stored a lot of files on my desktop. Yesterday when I switched on my computer it started installing windows updates, then the desktop had reset to the original factory settings and half my desktop files had gone. IE had also been upgraded to IE9. I managed to find my files in C>User>desktop and transferred them onto the new desktop setup. Then this morning when I switched it on again the computer had reverted to my original desktop again and the files I moved to the new desktop yesterday are absolutely nowhere. System restore doesn't help,
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Jan 2, 2011
I have a folder on my desktop which I used as a temporary location for pictures and videos. Once it was empty I deleted it but every time I open my internet browser it pops up again. I am using Mozilla Firefox and have checked the download settings but this folder is not named in any path that I can see. I also checked WMP but it doesn't appear there either. The only other program I used this folder with was Movavi to convert the video files to MP4 but it's not showing up there either.
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Jul 7, 2012
Last night my computer lost power and died instantly because the battery was at 0% and my charger wasn't working. So I just decided to go to sleep and deal with it in the morning. Well I boot up my laptop and instead of my regular old crowed desktop with many important files, I get this: please note that I have run virus scans and results show clean, as I also have not been using the internet for a while either. Should I try a system restore because it says it dosen`t affect documents?
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Nov 1, 2012
I recently upgraded a Win-XP home system to Win-7 Home Premium. Everything went fine. But I have four system icons on the desktop, two of which I want to keep and two that I'd like to get rid of. The two keepers are the My Computer and Network icons, the two I don't wan to see are the Home Group and Library icons. This machine is the only Win-7 box on the network so Home Group is moot, and I do not expect to explicitly use Libraries any time soon. So the associated icons are just clutter on the desktop. For whatever reason, the two keepers include a "delete" option in their right click menus but the two I actually want to delete don't. So, how do I get them off the desktop? I don't think any of the four were present on the desktop when I completed the installation, and I don't remember what I did to get them to show up.
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Feb 4, 2013
my desktop icon disappear on desktop a tried all i seen in this but i cant get?
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Sep 1, 2010
I did a search on this and could not find anything. Once in awhile my desktop will have a bunch of random files I deleted a long time ago. I always empty it too. There won't be anything in the recycle bin or on the desktop and then I'll go to look at it after awhile and some other group of files will be there. I have tried the whole "rd /s /q C:$Recycle.bin" on every drive on my computer. Windows is installed on C:. It isn't even the same group of files each time, it is just random files I've deleted over the past 2 months. I noticed a folder for a demo install of InDesign comes up a lot and says it is in use when I try to re-delete it, could Adobe's crap software be breaking it?
Windows 7 64 Ultimate, 12 gigs of ram, I7 processor. Hard drives are at most half full.
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Mar 12, 2010
Finally I have found the place where my problem might get solved.Thing is: 1.There is a big "X" on 3 out of 4 disks I got(except "C" disk) as shown in the picture below: 2.Desktop icons are changed as well but not all of them.This is the second time this kind of crap happens to me. Last time it happened was after I clicked system backup. I couldn't stand the problem so I reinstalled my windows 7 pro 32bit and at first it was all ok. It came back after I rebooted which I couldn't figure out why. The only diffrence is last time all the desktop icons were changed, but this time as you can see some of the icons aren't changed.
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Mar 9, 2012
I tried to download a PDF but something went wrong during the download and I ended up with a file icon on my desktop without any extension and having 0 bytes. When I try and delete this file icon I get the error message: "Could not find item. This is no longer located in C:UsersMynameDesktop. Verify the item's location and try again". This seems like a contradiction - Windows is showing a file icon on the desktop but then says there is no file there! I have tried searching for a file by that name elsewhere and there is nothing. I have also tried cleaning the reg and doing a disk cleanup. How to delete this useless file icon from my desktop?
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Feb 6, 2012
when i have a folder opened that points to a folder present on my desktop, and i physically delete the folder on the desktop, the folder's window remains opened & goes back to the desktop folder address.
ex:
C:UsersAdministratorDesktopNew folder opened on the deskbar & vm
C:UsersAdministratorDesktopNew folder deleted on the desktop .. .
C:UsersAdministratorDesktop appears as a folder on my deskbar
Wanted behavior as in previous windows versions: C:UsersAdministratorDesktopNew folder should disappear from the deskbar & vm, too.
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Sep 16, 2011
im new and i was wondering if anyone knows how to make the icons on your desktop appear they are not hidden its just when i restsrted my computer it went through and when the desktop showed up nothing was there now i have to load everything up from my desktop from the explorer folder to do anything.
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Aug 16, 2010
all of a sudden all my icons on my desk top are the same..they are one of my photo programs. When i click on any of them the photo program opens...how can i get all my icons to go back to the program that they really are??
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Apr 22, 2012
On a few occasions just recently my win 7 pro system has come out of "screen saver" with nothing but my desktop background displayed. If I then ctrl/alt/delete the screen goes black with just the cursor showing and otherwise unuseable. After a while the background will reappear but the only way that I can get the icons and everything back is to reboot.I have done a very thorough search for malware but none found. The problem never occurs whilst I am actually using the system and it does not always happen when it has been left to go into screen saver.
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Jun 26, 2011
no icons will appear on my desktop, but they will appear in the desktop folder in my personal folder.
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Aug 28, 2012
My desktop icons are messed up. i ran webroot and no malware showed threats. When i click on any desktop icon it goes to my windows media center and shows how to use videos and pictures. Only one icon--southwest airlines lets me go online wnen I click it. So here is what I can;t get when i click my desktop icons---internet explorer, windows live mail, system restore, disk cleanup, windows word, no games. I was hoping to use system restore. I just can't figure out what happened to my computer.
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Dec 19, 2012
Medion Intel i3 Destop Pc running Windows 7. My post earlier in week generated advice which I appreciated. All followed with no success. Event facility shows Certificate string of numbers about to expire. Then [URL]
Full detail on my earlier post:
A friend appears to have had a similar problem see his comments to me below... I have not been asked for money but to the wording above win/2004/08 a "fix" has been suggested by what looks like a Microsoft copy site. I have downloaded the "fix" but am concerned if I use it I may have greater problems.
"I lost my laptop with the " Security Shield " virus caught from roaming the web. This places 'Windows look-alike' shields over the top of every 'Desktop' icon, and clicking on it anywhere directs you to a website asking for money to remove it. You cannot access anything UNLESS you are set up with additional 'Users', when you can boot into one of them O.K.
This virus continually changes its name, and that is why the anti-virus programs cannot find it, and neither can anyone else for that matter. I had to change my hard drive and laboriously re-install everything which has taken weeks - I did have some backup so that helped. I would like to be able to access the old hard drive but dare not - even connecting up to format it would be a risk."
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