Solved Icons Like to Move to the Left Side of the Desktop

There are other discussions here about icons that move by themselves. Maybe the additional details I provide will help point to a solution.

I have 64-bit Windows 8.1 Update 1.

I divide my desktop icons into two groups. One group of icons is on the left side of my monitor and the other group is on the right side of my monitor. From time to time, some of my desktop icons on the right side move to the left side.

I have noticed the following:

* When I open a file to edit it - say, a Word document or a Notepad file - when I close the file, its icon sometimes moves from the right side of my monitor to the left side.

* Other times, file icons move by themselves without my doing anything to them. An icon that used to be on the right side is now on the left side. This seems to happen 'out of the blue' without any pattern.

* Icons move from the right side to the left side, but never from the left side to the right side.

* Only icons for Microsoft software are affected: MS Office, Windows utilities (Notepad, Wordpad) and desktop shortcuts.

* It seems that Windows 8.1 defaults to placing newly created icons on the left side of the monitor. For example: If I open MS Word, create a document, then save it, the file icon is always created on the left side of the monitor.

This may sound crazy, but judging from the above it seems that something is replacing Microsoft file icons with new, identical file icons which then move to the left side of the monitor because that's where all new file icons are created. If this is true I can't think of any third-party software that would do this.

[Solutions previously suggested, including unchecking Auto Arrange, updating video drivers and unchecking "Allow desktop themes to change..." do not solve this problem.]

Any ideas for a cause and solution to this problem?

A solution would be to install a program like DesktopOK which remembers icon positions and will restore them when you want top. I use it on 8.1 and now 10.

I'm wondering if it's caused by something you are running, on purpose or by default. You could try doing a Clean Boot and see what happens:

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/23382-troubleshoot-problem-clean-boot-windows-8-a.html

What are your view settings like ?

Here's what finally solved the problem for me: I had to delete my icon cache and let Windows create a new one after a restart. This means that my existing icon cache was corrupted. (Steps for this are published on the web. Here's a good explanation.)

Now I no longer have the problem of icons moving to the left side of my monitor on their own. This sometimes happened when Windows refreshed my desktop using the corrupted icon cache.

I also learned that Windows does, in fact, put newly created icons on the first available space on the left side of the monitor.

Using a third party app (like DesktopOK) might give me the desired result but it wouldn't solve the problem. I already mentioned that my View settings were set correctly.

It's been a long time, years, since I had to do a simple maintenance chore like refreshing the icon cache manually. I hope this is a rare occurrence rather than a sign of sloppy programming.