Do you play any games by chance? Some games will select a lower resolution screen than your preference. The desktop may exist under the game... and the icons attempt to rearrange themselves to fit the new size. When you quit the game, the icons are left in disarray.
The only non-MS software I have installed on my PC's is security software.
Even using the restore feature in XP does not put the icons back where they were.
And Dell technicians pretty much shrugged over this.
There's a lot of this basic stuff that MS has never gotten straight.
One problem that didn't exist in WordPerfect for DOS is when I use my mouse to click a place on the screen to start typing, the cursor remains visible as I type, which obscures the area I'm typing in, so my hands need to leave the keyboard to push the mouse to get the cursor out of the way.
As I remember, in WP, as soon as I started typing the cursor disappeared.
Basic stuff.
Meanwhile, IE doesn't have a font size large enough for my old eyes to comfortably read.
But to the rescue comes the latest upgrade to IE that I installed, with its magnify feature, allowing the user to magnify the screen 150%.
Sounds great, right?
No.
Because I often have to scroll left and right to read a web-page when it's magnified.
And here's a good one: whenever I magnify a web-page, the font size, which I set to large, gets setback to medium.
So when I'm done using the magnifying feature, I need to manually reset the font size.
And finally, should I want to copy text on a magnified web-page, I need to de-magnify it, else I cannot select it.
The incompetence of MS is incredible. This is basic stuff!