Sunday, September 28, 2008

No Icons on XP Desktop

No Icons on XP Desktop

If you have a desktop that seems to start up normally in that there are no Trojans or viruses infecting the system after you have just cleaned it using various cleaning programs you can find yourself with an XP desktop with no icons.

Although I have a post of the solution for no icons on XP desktop after cleaning a computer from malware here - Can't find explorer.exe or iexplore.exe when run from task manager. Malware such as Antivirus 2008, Antivirus XP, and others, can leave an Windows XP desktop in a state of cleanliness but those software miscreants but also in a state of no desktop icons.

The reason for this is that the infecting software puts in there hooks in a way that really alters the ways the XP home edition or the XP professional edition computers start up. That's what makes them so difficult to be cleaned. The registry location, which was very difficult to find and not so well known, has an incorrect "image" location for explorer. This registry key is a special key mainly for third party programs and explorer.exe should not be there at all. Just deleting the key makes gets the icons on an XP desktop show again.

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