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After importing the settings from my XP installation into the freshly installed copy of Windows 7 RTM with the included Windows Easy Transfer tool, I suddenly had two additional icons on my desktop: HomeGroup and Libraries. And there is no obvious way of removing them. You cannot just delete them and they are not listed in the “Desktop Icon Settings” dialog, either.

A quick Google search (maybe I should have used Bing for this…) turned up one suggested solution which is mentioned in several forums: Use RegEdit to delete {B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93} and {031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5} from HKLM\SOFWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace.

Well, don’t! This also removes HomeGroup and Libraries from the Explorer tree (and maybe other places). There must be a better solution. After all, the icons were not present on the desktop initially but they did show up in Explorer.

Under the assumption that all desktop icons (whether they are listed in “Desktop Icon Settings” or not) are managed in one place in the registry, I fired up RegEdit and Desktop Icon Settings, exported the registry, enabled the Control Panel icon on the desktop and then exported again. A diff of the two registry dumps showed one obvious change:

In HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\ClassicStartMenu a DWord entry named {5399E694-6CE5-4D6C-8FCE-1D8870FDCBA0} was changed from 1 to 0. The same entry was added with value 0 to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel.

I checked the same folders under HKLM. They contain more entries, including {B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93} and {031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}. Hey, those IDs look familiar! I created copies of them with value 1 unter HKCU\…\ClassicStartMenu and HKCU\…\NewStartPanel and voilà, the icons were gone from the desktop.

I hope you don’t have to waste as much time on this problem as I did. Disclaimer: Changing the registry can mess up your system. Do this at your own risk!