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Level 1

5 points

Rearranging Icons on the Desktop

Hello everyone. I had this problem before 10.6, but it's only been occurring the past few days. I have my icons arranged a certain way, and whenever I restart, shutdown, or simply logout/login, my icons are completely rearranged. I have my dock on the right-hand side of my screen, and the icons (with the exception of the Macintosh HD icon) get pushed to the far right. Some pictures of the before and after are linked below.

Before: http://www.bartleyrichardson.com/public_img/icon-before.jpg
After: http://www.bartleyrichardson.com/public_img/icon-after.jpg

I have tried the following:
- Deleted the desktop.plist file from /Users/<me>/Library/Preferences/
- Attempted to change the size (both icons and grid)
- Tried to move the icons to another place on the desktop far away from the dock
- Made the dock occupy the full vertical space on the right-hand side
- Made the dock as small as possible

None of the above options made any difference. The one thing that did work was to move the dock back down to the bottom of the screen. Then my icons stayed in their proper arrangement.

I've also tried all of the combinations under "View Options" for my icons. This includes arranging by name, last modified, aligning to grid, and no arrangement at all. None of these seem to make any difference. As you can probably tell by the pictures, my icons seem to be arranged in alpha/numeric order upon restart/login (no matter what I've told Finder to do).

This started happening after the last 10.5 update (10.5.8). It persists under 10.6. I'd be extremely grateful for any help!

MacBook Pro 15" unibody (early 2009), Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Aug 28, 2009 3:36 PM

84 replies

_Rosco_

Level 1

0 points

Oct 22, 2009 12:36 AM in response to BartleyR7

Folks,
A good way to quickly check if this problem is likely to be solved by a clean install of Snow Leopard is by simply creating a new user profile in System Preferences > Accounts. Then log in to that new account and see if the same problem exists. If the same problem exists then it is system wide but if not then the problem is isolated to the the user profile that was upgraded during the Snow Leopard upgrade. This is very possible and many minor issues have been spotted with upgraded user profiles such as this issue.

Hope this helps.

Rosco
proposed | solution

Nov 26, 2009 6:09 AM in response to _Rosco_

Hi,
I had the same problem on each start up: all icons went to the right side of the screen.
After changing my main computer password it didn't happen again for the last dozen of start ups!
Hope this may help you.

dodman

Level 1

4 points

Dec 1, 2009 10:46 AM in response to flyer.one

Same happenned with me which is a complete and utter F$£$%^@£%$ because I had hundreds of icons on my desiktop with my entire workflow and now they're all arranged alphabetically down the side - thanks Apple - five years of workflow down the tube. Have tried everything suggested here but nothing works.

RDB3

Level 1

0 points

Dec 7, 2009 9:04 PM in response to dodman

I had the same problem of icons ending up on the right after any restart (in both 10.5 and 10.6), which was resolved by deleting the hidden .DS_Store file on the desktop. It rebuilt itself and the problem went away. YMMV

Jan 14, 2010 7:09 PM in response to Pascal Beausoleil

Please forget my previous post recopied bellow..

I take it back, I still have the same annoying problem (clean install 10.6.2)

Indeed, my solution was based on false hope...

Pascal Beausoleil wrote:

{quote:title=jmm-frency wrote:}I have just upgraded to 10.6 and encountered the sale issue: "auto-Rearranging icons" when logging out and in again{quote}

I had the same problem since I did upgrade to Snow Leopard. Same problem, even with a clean install of 10.6.1 on a blank disk.

Here is how I did fix that issue.

Finder - View - Show View Options - Arrange by: (select "snap to grid")

Otherwise, it seems like the problem is related to the "Grid Spacing" adjustment feature, but selecting "snap to grid" as a preference for the desktop should fix everything.

P-

Jan 17, 2010 7:24 AM in response to Pascal Beausoleil

Hi all,

I had the same annoying problem on my Mac Pro. I read that it might come from the corrupt finder file ".DS_Store". Following the instructions how to delete this hidden file by using the utility Terminal, did not work... But then I found out that using the freeware Onyx it is very easy to delete the desktop's .DS_Store file. E voilà: this fixed the problem!

Maybe this information could help you, too.

Bye, Stefan

Feb 5, 2010 8:08 AM in response to BartleyR7

There also used to be a useful 'snap to grid' feature in Leopard where if you held the CMD key when drag/dropping an icon on the desktop, it would snap to the grid. This appears to be broken/non existent in Snow Leopard, which is a shame because it was incredibly useful.

Feb 28, 2010 1:37 AM in response to John Simon Beverly

TinkerTool may be a solution!

Open TinkerTool - Finder options - select 1st one - "Show hidden and system files"
Relaunch finder to activate changes. Trash the .DS_Store file on the right top of the screen. Wait a couple of seconds before it rebuilds or relaunch the finder again.
Before shutting down or restarting the computer I execute as explained above getting an actualized .DS_Store file for the next time.
It works with me but be careful, use it at your own risk.

purepeter

Level 2

237 points

Mar 25, 2010 2:34 AM in response to Fred Grieve

same here, i experience this problem every 10th reboot since 6 month. its annoying. (10.6)
i try the hint with tinker tool now and report back soon!

thx

Parneix

Level 1

15 points

Apr 2, 2010 9:01 AM in response to BartleyR7

The solution proposed here worked for me as well : I trashed the hidden file .DS_Store located on the desktop. Then I chose "none" as the option for icons organization on the desktop. I find that "align to grid" behave erratically.

P.

Apr 12, 2010 1:17 PM in response to BartleyR7

Hello,

I deleted the hidden .DS_Store file on the desktop, using Onyx, a few days ago.
I changed the view options to Arrange by: NONE. Previously it was to "Snap to grid".

Unfortunately after a few days, the problem came back.
😟

Since the icons on the desktop are being rearranged, I believe the problem lies in the finder window view. When you change the view (list, column or cover flow) inside a finder window, it seems that at this time something will go wrong on next login. Notice that if you change a view in one finder folder. When you go into a new finder window, the last change applies on previous window. There must be a conflict there, that affects the desktop icons.

Hope Apple find the problem...
Good luck!
P.S.: Strange that this problem does not exist in 10.5 (Leopard).

Apr 13, 2010 2:29 PM in response to BartleyR7

I don´t thinks the question is solved. As for several others, the problem was NOT solved for me when deleting the DS.store file; also deleting the respective plist, in addition, did not result in a stable situation: for a few starts all is OK, but then again the icons are rearranged upon start.
I had the impression that i came with updating to 10.6.3, and i have the problem definitely only since a few weeks/months. But it appears both on my desktop and on the MacBook which are completely independent; either was previously running 10.5 and updated the simple way to 10.6.

Apple should address this obvious bug - it is really extremely nasty to spent again and again time to bring the things into the old, rational order on the desktop!

Apr 13, 2010 11:22 PM in response to BartleyR7

Same problem here: 2 MacPros - 1 affected, 1 smooth.

Icons on the desktop are always O.K., but most of the icons in windows with icon view are rearranged randomly from time to time - randomly means: no grid, no order (alphabetically, date), swapping... Rearranging manually helps for some days... Sometimes... The problem appeared in 10.6.

All suggested solutions didn't work.

Apr 14, 2010 2:33 AM in response to BartleyR7

same problem reported here :
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2379700&tstart=0

ApMaX

Level 2

152 points

Apr 17, 2010 5:02 AM in response to YvesTourmen

And here:

Desktop items get unsorted after cold boot on Snow Leopard 10.6.2
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11391937#11391937

Rearranging Icons on the Desktop