Show Desktop icon

They’ve been deploying new Dell desktops in my department at the university. It’s nice to have Windows XP at work since I’ve been using it at home for the past year and a half. (Dear Mac Users: I also use Macs…). Today someone asked me: “Whatever happened to that ‘Show Desktop’ icon in the Quick Launch bar?” Interesting question. I don’t normally show the Quick Launch toolbar so I hadn’t noticed it being gone. But sure enough, it wasn’t there on her system. I checked mine, it wasn’t there. “Strange,” I thought, “why would Microsoft take away a fairly useful icon?” Or perhaps not so strange. I noticed tonight that my Win XP Pro system at home has a Show Desktop icon when I turned on the Quick Launch toolbar. So apparently the IT folks in our department decided we didn’t need that icon.

But it was Friday, and I thought surely there’s an easy fix. We went Start/Help And Support and searched for “show desktop.” Only one hit in the ‘suggested topics.’ I had her look in the Knowledge Base. Sure enough there was the fix we were looking for. Or rather there was an article pertaining to the Show Desktop icon that linked to another article that actually detailed how to recreate it. Unfortunately the article (190355) was not accurate for XP. The fix didn’t exactly work and was certainly more involved than one would care for a simple desktop icon. Basically, you have to create a short SCF script and place it in the windows/system32 directory and then we created a shortcut to the file. The last step was the one that wasn’t right. The article said to copy the shortcut to some arcane directory buried deep in the system32 folder, but instead we just dragged the shortcut to the Quick Launch toolbar and the icon was automatically created. My friend had her Show Desktop icon, and I wondered why it had been removed in the first place.

UPDATE: J. writes to say that it wasn’t the fault of the IT people, but rather a problem with XP “copying standard items from the administrator profile to the all users profile.” At any rate, if you click the hyperlinked number above, you’ll be taken to the Microsoft support article that details how to fix the problem.