I have my icons spread around my desktop to make the most of the space. I like to clump icons together in related themes: computer, Internet, scripting, and applications. I catch a lot of criticism for this way of organizing my desktop, but it makes sense to me. If I want to open a browser, I immediately go the Internet section (top-right corner) and only have to choose from about 8 icons instead of all of them.
This is all well and good, but you don’t care about how I organize my desktop. The point of describing my layout is to better explain the problem at hand. If you have icons at the bottom or right side of your desktop, these icons will be moved around (usually auto-arranged back to the left-side) in a few scenarios:
A) If you connect to your computer with Remote Desktop (with default settings) from a computer with a lower resolution
B) If a full-screen application (like a computer game) crashes
C) If you have to lower the resolution or increase the DPI temporarily
You can use a tiny app to save the position of your desktop and restore it whenever you like. There are a number of applications out there that offer this functionality. The one that I found and like is Desktop Restore. It is just a simple home-brew application, only a 260KB download, and integrates itself into the shell when you right-click on the desktop, making it both easily available and out of the way.
After installing the .msi and restarting the computer, you just right-click on a blank spot of your desktop and see your new options.
You can save your icon positions with ‘Save Desktop’. You’ll want to arrange your icons to where you want them (if they aren’t already) and then do this first by clicking ‘Save Desktop…’. A simple confirmation will pop-up.
If your icons ever run afoul, just restore them by, again, right-clicking on the desktop and choosing ‘Restore Desktop’. You can also setup custom icon templates with the ‘Custom Save/Restore…’ This allows you to name settings and pull up different icon arrangements at will.
Download Desktop Restore.