Icon Layout Messed Up

[Goran]

Sometimes when I start my computer (either form sleep mode or start up) icons on my Desktop 1 are rearranged on the left side of the desktop. Why Dexpot is doing this? What should I do so Dexpot always remembers my icons layout? It's annoying to rearrange icons every 2-3 days.

[Ragemar]

I have the same issue every now and then when I boot up my pc all icons have rearranged themselfe at the left side

It seems random how long they decide to stay after I move them around.

I am running win7 dualscreen, dexpot 1.6.10 Build 2373.
Could be a OS issue on my win8 machine I have not noticed icons moving allthough its a work laptop so the icon clutter is not as bad

[Patrick]

Dexpot doesn't move your icons to the left, Windows does.

When Dexpot starts at Windows login, you can probably prevent it by going to "Settings > General" and setting the "Initial desktop" to "Last active desktop". This way, the location of the desktop folder doesn't have to be changed when you start Dexpot.

If the problems occurs at a different time (not sure why it would) you can restore the icon layout with the "Reload icons from profile" hotkey (Settings > Controls > Hotkeys > Miscellaneous).

[Ragemar]

Thanks for a fast answer,

i had a suspicion that it was windows that was being jealous. I did the changes to the settings as you suggested and will return in a week or so to let you know if that did the trick.

If it does the trick im defenetly going to get a pro version this mostly just because the speed of the support should be rewarded

[johnnysocko]

I'm going to re-ask this question for hopefully a little clarification, because while I've grown to like dexpot extension, this is one issue that drives me crazy.

I probably use the tool at its most basic level. I have 4 named desktops, and I've got icons positioned on all them just the way I want them.

I've had problems with crashing in the past, so I wrote my own archival process where I tar up all the profile folders under "appdata" Dexpot. If there's a problem, explorer crash, whatever, an event where I've learned dexpot is going to be hurting, I'll quick kill Dexpot, then restore the "appdata" folder from tar, then restart Dexpot.

This works, for the most part, EXCEPT, the dang icon positions are never predictable it seems. Yes, all lined up on the LHS and not a darn thing I can do about it except go manually assign the icon positions yet again.

So, based on this thread and the response, are you saying Dexpot maintains no positional information about icons, it is just a visible invisible attribute change and you rely on Windows to ultimately place them? Is there any clever thing one could to to have windows save a certain icon state and restore it when things go bad?

"Go Bad" seems primarily to be one or two things. First, explorer dies, which we all know happens. Second, okay, something hangs, desktop unresponsive, start killing explorer and other things to get the desktop to recover. Remote events, sure, but having to manually rebuild the dexpot placements is a real bummer.

Sorry, been saving this frustration up for a while

Oh yea, the specifics.
Windows7 64Bit HomePremium SP1
Latest Dexpot

[Patrick]

Are you using separate folder or shared folder icon customization? (Settings > Switching Desktops > Desktop elements > Desktop icons > Advanced)

[johnnysocko]

Options selected are
- Create a separate folder for each desktop (think I've seen them, right in Windows user 'Desktop' folder?)
- Use original Windows desktop folder as 'Desktop 1'

[Patrick]

Ok, thanks. You're right, Explorer crashes can actually be a problem in this case. I wasn't aware of that. We'll try to improve it.

Next time when icon positions go wrong, before you do any further desktop switching, middle-click (or Shift+left-click) on the Dexpot tray icon and select "Restore icons". There also is a hotkey with the same name and functionality.

[johnnysocko]

Interesting, you can recreate Explorer crashes to verify this?

Actually, I guess no one should be surprised at that

[Patrick]

I don't have any actual Explorer crashes, but killing and restarting explorer.exe using Task Manager has the same effect.