Apr/102
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…
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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June 11th, 2010
Thanks for this.
I figured out it was a scheduled task that was causing it, but no idea it was a PS script
MS has a recommended fix, but it involves turning off ALL the maintenance tasks. (boo)
See link here.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978980/en-au?p=1
June 11th, 2010
Also something else I found
the file “RS_RemoveShortcuts.ps1″ in the same directory contains the line (line 12)
“Remove-FileList $brokenDesktopShortcuts”
change this to “# Remove-FileList $brokenDesktopShortcuts”
To stop killing links to network shares and usb devices when they go offline for a brief period.