An anonymous reader doesn’t like the way Windows sometimes rearranges icons on his desktop. Can he protect himself against this annoyance?
Yes, with a free program by Jamie O’Connell called Desktop Restore. It comes in two versions.
Once you install the shell extension
version, you’ll 
If you’d rather not install anything, there’s the command line version. But this one requires a bit of a learning curve–especially if you’re not comfortable in Windows’ DOS-like command line environment.
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