21
Apr/10
2

Windows 7: Desktop Icons suddenly disappear

I love Windows 7! It’s robust, fast, looks great and command lines / power shell / wmi / scripting platforms are just awesome.
In other words: It kicks the hell out of a Banana (or some other proprietary fruit I can’t remember).
However, there still are some little things that cause headache: Why would anyone do this!?
This is what I thought after my desktop shortcuts disappeared for the 3rd time after a while being unused.

Turned out there is a maintenance Task that runs as a Scheduled task under Windows 7. It executes various powershell scripts including this:

%windir%\diagnostics\scheduled\Maintenance\
RS_RemoveUnusedDesktopIcons.ps1

If you comment out line 57, you should be good to go and your Desktop Icons won’t disappear anymore:

Replace “Remove-FileList $deleteList”
with “# Remove-FileList $deleteList”

Note: To edit the file you must first take ownership and grant you permissions to it!

Hope that helps…

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Filed under: Windows 7