Sunday, April 26, 2009

Replace your missing Desktop IE icon in XP SP3

If you've installed service pack 3 in Windows XP and removed the Internet Explorer icon from your desktop you may have also realized that it's not so simple to replace the icon. Oh sure you can just create a shortcut to the program itself but then you won't have all the right click menu items associated with the original icon. In previous service packs, Microsoft allowed the recreation of the icon in a menu inside the control panel's display settings. Since their court battles about the integration of IE inside the operating system they seemed to have removed this feature all together.

Please only do this if you are moderately comfortable with the registry editor. Manipulating keys in the registry can really mess up your OS. That being said, enabling the icon can be done by opening your registry editor start/run/regedit and Navigating to the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore\HideDesktopIcons\

You may see either NewStartPanel like I did or ClassicStartMenu, inside whichever one your using you would create a new key then inside that key you create a DWORD (32-bit) value named {871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D} and set it with value of 0 (dword:00000000).

After doing that, if you've done it correctly you can refresh the desktop by pressing F5 or right click on it and click refresh.

Voila, your icon should be restored!
Happy computing...

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