Remove Icons from desktop

[ridergroov]

Yesterday evening i downloaded a small Game from web and installed it on my Vista laptop. Installation went fine, and it placed a shortcut icon for the game on my desktop as well similar as most of the applications do. All ok so far. I played the game, finished it and uninstalled from the system. I removed all its folders and files but when tried to delete the desktop shortcut icon, it wont allow me to delete.

I found a instruction in the help section to deal with such icons. According to the same went to to my "Personalization" and clicked on the left pane and got
the change desktop window but the game icon was not there. That means there is no way to delete that icon from my desktop. When i tried to drag the icon on my Recycle Bin, it comes with a pop saying "the file cannot be found"

Can anyone please tell me how to remove such icons? Is it virus?

[Mr Frances]

Probably your desktop is not refreshing itself. Right-click on your Desktop, and select 'Refresh'. The offending icon should then be gone. Did you tried restarting the computer? Is it still there?

[McIntyre]

Hey guys, even i have a similar problem but bit worse. First, my "phoenix RC demo" created a desktop shortcut, removed the program after using it but the desktop icon remained there. It doesn't go even by right click > delete, or even after restarting the pc several times.

Secondly the worse part is that when i click or select this icon, my Windows Explorer freezes completely. I also checked my desktop folder under c:\users\me\desktop, but it wont appear there.

How can i delete it? Any idea?

[aubrey1@ntlworld.com]

Hi, I also have a dead icon. shedder and it will not go. refresh does not work, right click there is no delete. drag and drop i get a black circle with a line through it. goto desktop cant delete it there. so annoying. go to reg edit. be carefull in there can knacker system if you delete the wrong thing. cant find the problem, am going to try to install shedder again if i can find where it came from then uninstall it to see if thet does it. dead icons are a headache.
any clever people out there know what im babbling on about. Thanks

[jlobaza]

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you guys mentioning creating a zip file out of the icon, and then deleting it. Let me tell you what happened. I dragged a video file over from my camcorder, and my system crashed. When I rebooted, I had an icon for the video file that said 0 bytes and could not delete it for anything. My system kept crashing every minute or so after this happened. You talk about a pain in the a(#! I tried various programs, doing a safe boot, using deletion programs, but nothing worked. Then I tried Winrar, and right clicked and created a zip file and checked off the "delete file after archiving," and guess what? After the file was compressed (even though it said there was 0 bytes, there was 350mb of compressed data), it deleted that damn icon, and my system no longer crashed...like i said, that comment about archiving it and deleting the file saved myself from having to take this thing in and have someone else delete it for me...thanks!

[barrypjones]

yessss!! the trick to right click and send to the compress.zip area worked. i had to tell it to install on desktop by clicking yes. it wouldnt disappear until then.
thanx!!

[klg]

For Windows XP - This worked for me on four old stubborn "dead" icons:

1.) You right-click the "dead" icon and select "create shortcut"

2.) you then right-click the "dead" icon and select delete and it is gone,

3.) then you simply delete the 'shortcut' icon and then they are finally gone.

Hope it works for you.