All of a sudden XP rearranges my taskbar icons after restarts?

[Denvers Dawgs]

Ok so I have had the same 7 or so icons added to my task bar for years, without issue. This morning I needed to restart my pc, and when rebooted the icons on my task bar were in a different order, so I rearranged them and then locked the task bar again, and did another restart, again the icons got changed. I scanned for virus/malware but nothing was found. So why after several years of perfect use has the task bar started to change the order of my icons on restarts? Any ideas?

[betwixt]

Another weird and scary MS feature.
I've had the same happen, I use a customized "Windows Classic" desktop and task bar, nothing has changed on it for a year or more but twice in the past week it has changed back to the XP default background image and task bar. At the same time the Windows default sounds turn back on as well, they are normally disabled here.

[orsetto]

The most likely cause is a minor Windows Security Update that could have been auto-downloaded at any point in the past but did not become active in the system until you rebooted. MS spews countless security patches every month and they're almost impossible to avoid or manage: I have my XP boxes all set to manual updates to be controlled at my discretion, but XP has all sorts of sneaky back door ways of overriding this and installing them anyway. Have you tried using System Restore to roll back your configuration to the day before the problem started? This sometimes cures such issues.

Of course there are many other other possible causes for your taskbar problem, it could be system corruption that only appeared when you rebooted. That is harder to cure, might need registry repair tools and more than just a vague clue how to fix it. If System Restore doesn't fix it, and there are no other symptoms, try to live with it unless something more significant occurs. Then you might consider having a guru look at it.

[betwixt]

hmmm... I think I am the guru!

Sorry for not making it clear but I've been in IT and programming since 1977, that's before the PC and DOS were invented, and well before any version of Windows hit the market. I do not have 'system restore' on any of the many PCs here as they all have their entire hard disks backed up daily anyway. All updates are scrutinized and done manually too. Several are blacklisted but the security ones I do allow to install. As you state, MS has built back doors into XP and they use them themselves to do sneaky things without your knowledge, I'm sure they don't tell the entire truth about some of the updates either. Whatever causes the problem we have seen appears to be a bug in the core Windows OS, I'm guessing a timer rolls over or a counter overflows and causes something in the registry to reset the desktop back to it's default settings. It's a pain but I'll live with it, I know it isn't an infection, it definitely gets triggered by an OS process.
Half the systems here are either dual-boot or run Linux, they never give any trouble in Linux mode. I don't want to start another OS war though so I'll shut up!

[Nelson37]

System Restore has the advantage of offering multiple restore points, full-disk backup you usually have only one or two.

I've seen multiple causes for this behavior, usually either MSupdate and/or video driver related. Registry cleanup sometimes helps. Sometimes not.

[betwixt]

If it was due to an update I would expect it to show on the next reboot or in rare occasions on the second reboot. Sometimes an installation is completed at boot time so it would not be effective until the next time. The problem people are seeing appears to be completely random and not related to system changes though.

I never use system restore, it's a waste of disk space. Keeping a backup on the same media as the original is asking for trouble. I clone whole partitions on to the next computer in line so the data is physically on a different system. Then once a month a BD backup of all the systems is taken and archived.