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BartleyR7 Author

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

vakras

Level 1

9 points

Feb 11, 2011 4:17 PM in response to Michel the drycleaner

thanks Michel, my View Options were set to "none" when the desktop was rearranged again, and again ... My view settings are still set at "none".

Feb 28, 2011 8:48 AM in response to fdboucher

fdboucher: I do not dispute that this "solution" might have helped some people. But like I said before, it is what I tried first because it is so obvious. And it DOESN'T solve the problem, ciboire.

Vakras is absolutely right, the problem remains UNSOLVED, and is not limited to the desktop.

What a mess.

May 19, 2011 7:39 AM in response to Michel the drycleaner

Hi all.

For what it's worth: on 2011-05-17, all my desktop icons were re-arranged (in alphabetical order!) without my doing anything special.

Thank goodness I had kept a snapshot of my personnalized arrangement.

So the problem still lurks in there!

(I'm now on OS X 10.6.7)

May 24, 2011 6:15 PM in response to Michel the drycleaner

Hi again.

Re-arranged again today. (I think after downloading a program from ambrosiasw.com...)

Still not fixed, eh!?

Jun 7, 2011 6:36 PM in response to Michel the drycleaner

Michael, you're right, 10.6.7 did not fix that nasty bug.

With Lion install not requiring a reboot (so says Engadget today), I'm rather scared that the Finder will keep screwing us over.

But who knows, maybe they FINALLY fixed it. That said, Snow Leopard remains a sick beast.

Jun 14, 2011 1:43 PM in response to Michel the drycleaner

A question to anyone who's seen this problem:

How many icons do you have on your desktop?

My hypothesis is that the problem occurs when the number of icons exceeds some arbitrary limit (which I believe is about 100 icons).

Jun 14, 2011 2:11 PM in response to Justin Bur

Justin,

Sorry to shoot down your hypothesis. Had the same idea, since I had lots of stuff on my desktop. So I moved everything to a folder (and took a snapshot, as I;m now compelled to do for every folder arranged in icon view). Since then, I've never had more than 10 icons on the desktop (and that's counting the two internal drive icons).

Well guess what. The arbitrary re-arrangement of icons in alpha order still strikes every now and then.

It's a Finder- and/or windowing subsystem-related bug, as it happens either after a restart, a logout, or a Finder crash.

There's at least 3 other Mac power users in my dept (we're all molecular biologists) who are reduced to making screenshots of folder contents. All of them seasoned Mac veterans who see 10.6 as the only unworthy Mac OS iteration since System 6 (to be honest,10.0 wasn't exactly great either, but only because it felt unfinished).

Jun 14, 2011 2:14 PM in response to Patrick McDonald

Forgot to say that I've had fewer than 10 icons on the desktop for 3 months now. Bug strikes every 3-4 restarts since then (or right after a Finder crash if system is on continuously for over a week).

Jun 14, 2011 6:43 PM in response to Justin Bur

Hi Justin (and all the others).

If I remember right, the first time this happened to me, I must have had about 50-60 icons on the desktop.

The last time it happened, I had about 15.

(And as soon as I get around to it, I'll finally have only one icon on the desktop; and hope that Lion has figured out how to leave things where it finds them...)

Best regards.

Jun 16, 2011 1:10 PM in response to Michel the drycleaner

Thank you, Patrick and Michel, for shooting down my false hypothesis.

I'm starting to get used to an alphabetical desktop... it's easier than rearranging all those icons every few weeks.

Jul 20, 2011 1:22 PM in response to BartleyR7

Hi all.

For what it's worth, I just turned the computer on and all my desktop icons have been re-arranged (in alphabetical order). Yet I did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in my previous session.

I'm now down to only 10 desktop icons, but still, it's painful to see this bug live so long with no response at all (to my knowledge) from Apple...

Regards.

ApMaX

Level 2

154 points

Jul 24, 2011 11:54 AM in response to BartleyR7

Mac OS X 10.6.8 has the same bug. Why has not been fixed yet?

BTW, I have never installed BlueHarvest.