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!
Something is going wrong with the shutdown of your machines. I’ve been using desktop icon Windows (ie 95 or above) since before it even betaed, and there’s only two conditions that make my desktop icons move, the first is what Swordmaker pointed out, poorly written games that screw with the screen resolution of the entire machine to run; and the second is something going wrong with the commitment of the desktop.ini on shutdown, which usually means something’s wrong with the machine that’s hosing the entire shutdown process. Might check that security software, it could be write protecting the ini or something else annoying, if the security software is Norton get rid of it because it’s doing a lot of bad things to the machines.
In Word 2003 the cursor goes away when you start typing.
If IE’s fonts are too small for your eyes you should probably change your screen resolution.
The magnify feature is a bad cludge, no doubt about it. Of course if you setup the computer so you could see the stuff you wouldn’t need it in the first place.