Stuff has started mysteriously disappearing from my desktop. I had installed Fences, so thought that was the culprit, and uninstalled it. But the problem keeps happening, and it turns out that Windows 7 is causing my pain.
Windows runs a weekly maintenance task that deletes all your shortcuts if it thinks you have more than four “broken” ones. Bad! The problem is exacerbated my Windows being mistaken about what’s a “broken” file. It’s counting all my shortcuts coming from an “always online” shared network drive, even though none of them are really broken. System maintenance task can clean stuff out of temp all it likes, maybe even delete old log files, but stay away from messing with my desktop!
MSFT offers two solutions: don’t have more than four shortcuts on your desktop (ummm, no), or turn off all system mainteance (ummm, no). The best solution I’ve found is to hack the Windows 7 maintenance scripts to stop them mis-counting files. Doing this felt like being a Linux user used to feel like. I guess I should be grateful that I can hack these files – I was a little surprised to be able to.