Background

After every restart, the icons in my Quick Launch toolbar in Windows Vista were rearranged into alphabetical order. The toolbar itself was resized, taking up most of the Taskbar. It didn’t matter how many times I carefully moved the icons around, nor did it matter if I logged off and back on, restarted, or shut down and powered back up—I couldn’t get the icons to stay the way I want them. I don’t remember when it started, so I can’t pinpoint what changed on my system that might have caused it.

After much searching, I found various solutions to a similar problem in Windows XP. Several solutions suggested installing third-party utilities that reset your Desktop back to the way you like after each restart. I’m generally not a big fan of adding on utilities to fix problems with the operating system; I prefer to fix the OS. I finally found one solution that worked for me with Vista that fixed a problem deep inside the Windows Registry.

Read on for the details on how I fixed this annoying quirk.

In this article

Warning: If you are not familiar with the Windows Registry, it’s where the majority of your computer’s configuration and settings are stored. Always backup your system before tweaking your Registry to help avoid data loss. The solution below worked for me, but your situation could be different. You assume all risk and agree to hold my company and me harmless from any damages, direct or indirect, including lost data, time, and profits.

You may find it useful to print this article and work from the printout since you will need to logoff or restart your computer to complete this process. At the very least, you should bookmark this page (or “add it to your Favorites” depending on which browser you use) so you can find it again if you need it later.

Manually updating the Registry

Here is the way to update your Registry manually (which I prefer since I can verify that everything matches what is expected):

1. Go to the Start menu, select “Run…”, and type “regedit” where it asks for the program you wish to open. Note: You must have administrative rights to run RegEdit.
2. After RegEdit has opened, navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER → Software → Microsoft → Windows → CurrentVersion → Policies → Explorer
3. Look for an entry named “NoSaveSettings” of type “REG_DWORD” with a value of “0×00000000 (0)” or “0×00000001 (1)”.
   1. If the value is “0×00000000 (0)”, then the setting is correct, and you are facing a different challenge. Close RegEdit and look for a different solution. Sorry.
   2. If the value is “0×00000001 (1)”, then double-click the icon for “NoSaveSettings” and change the value data from “1″ to “0″ (whether it’s hex or decimal doesn’t matter) and click OK. Close RegEdit. Skip to step #5.
   3. If the value is any other number, you can try changing the value to “0″, but I’m not sure what will happen. The value should only be a 0 or a 1. You should either write down the value for future reference (if things go wrong), or right-click the “Explorer” key, and “Export” the key to a file that you can use to put things back the way they were before you made changes.
4. It’s very likely that you do not have an entry named “NoSaveSettings” (I didn’t.) In that case, you will need to add one.
   1. After clicking on “Explorer” in the left pane of RegEdit, go to the “Edit” menu (or right-click in an open space in the right pane) and select “New” and then “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
   2. A new entry named “New Value #1″ should appear in the right pane. Rename it to “NoSaveSettings” (note that there are no spaces in that name!).
   3. Double-click the icon for “NoSaveSettings” and change the value data from “1″ to “0″ (whether it’s hex or decimal doesn’t matter) and click OK.
   4. Close RegEdit. You’re almost done.
5. Go ahead and reorganize and resize your Quick Launch toolbar the way you want it. This will hopefully be the last time you have to do this.
6. Now either restart (that’s what I did) or logoff and logon. Your Quick Launch toolbar should be the way you left it.
7. If it’s not right, repeat step #5 and #6. If it still isn’t right, you are facing a different challenge. Look for a different solution. Sorry. If you find another solution that does work, feel free to leave the information or a link to the information in a comment below to help other people find it. Thanks!

Semi-automatically updating the Registry

If you do not like using RegEdit, you can create a registry patch file that accomplishes the same thing. This is, in fact, and export from my own Registry. All you need to do is open Notepad, copy the following text from this web page, paste it into a new Notepad document, and save the file on your Desktop as "NoSaveSettings.reg". The quote marks ARE important (otherwise Notepad tries to save the file as a text document), but the file name and location are not (these are just convenient examples). Double-click the file. It should warn you of the dangers of adding information to your Registry from unsavory sources. Click Yes (if you think this will work for you). Then proceed from Step #5 above.

—- Start copying below this line —-
[code lang="ini"]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoSaveSettings"=dword:00000000

[/code]
—- End copying above this line —-

Other resources

For a few other ideas, you can read the article at Annoyances.org that led me to this solution.

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s really annoying. Your Windows Desktop refreshes (often after a program crashes), and all the icons on your Desktop and in the Start Menu have been reset to generic icons that all look alike. Sometimes it’s a temporary thing, and restarting the computer will fix it. Other times it takes a different tool.There are a number of nifty tools available from Microsoft’s web site called “Power Toys”. These are a bunch of little applets that tweak or enhance the way Windows works. There are things like fancier calculators, image re-sizers, and ones that are a little difficult to explain (but do really neat things). These Power Toys are version-specific (i.e., you can’t use the Windows XP Power Toys under Windows 98 for example). The WinXP version is available here.

Out of all the Power Toys that are available, TweakUI is probably the most useful tool of all. This TweakUI gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more. It comes in two versions, one for standard 32-bit processor machines (e.g., Celerons, Pentiums, etc.) and also for 64-bit Itanium processor machines. It runs under Windows XP Service Pack 1 or later, as well as Windows Server 2003.

To restore your Desktop and Start Menu icons, download the appropriate version of TweakUI, install it, and then run it. In the left-hand column at the bottom is an option to “Repair”. Click it, and you will see that “Rebuild Icons” is the selected option in the pull-down menu. Click the “Repair Now” button, and all your icons should magically reappear. It will also reset the order of your icons (which could be slightly annoying if you have carefully lined up your icons up in a particular pattern).

This handy tool can also fix problems related to a messed up Fonts folder, your Unread Mail Count, and many other things. Feel free to poke around and see what else you can tweak. Just remember that all Power Toys are unsupported by Microsoft. I’ve never had a problem with them, but if you do, Microsoft cannot bail you out (and neither can we).

So tweak at your own risk.