Or anyhow, her desktop was fine again

Help desk pilot fish receives a trouble ticket: "Staffer called to say that all the icons on her desktop have been doubled and they cannot be deleted. Supervisor called and verified she can separate some of them but they cannot be deleted."

Fish is pretty sure he knows what the problem is, but the user is out of the office. So fish tells the supervisor that she can serve as IT guru and fix the problem when the user gets back. Then fish explains what he suspects the problem is, and the appropriate fix.

"The supervisor had a good laugh," fish says. "I checked with her a few days later. She confirmed that my diagnosis and fix were correct.

"About a year ago, I had to replace the failing hard drive in this user's computer. To make the changeover as transparent as possible, I took a snapshot of her desktop and and saved it in her My Pictures folder so I could put the appropriate icons back in the same locations on her desktop on the new drive.

"Sure enough, the user was looking through the pictures in that folder, said, 'Hey, that's my desktop!' and set it as the desktop background.

"She couldn't delete the icons in the background image. Couldn't move them, either. Once the desktop picture was changed, she was fine again."

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