What do you do whenever someone comes along and messes up your Desktop layout?  It's not an IF-- it's a WHEN!  Long and hard as you've worked to have the icons placed just so, some wayward fingers (maybe yours) will come along and mess it up, and you're stuck having to redo everything.

Well, fret no more!

Pretend you're a vacuum cleaner salesperson coming into someone's home and purposely dumping dirt on their nice clean carpet, smug in the knowledge that you've got the tool to make things tidy again.

First download this zip file from Kelly's Korner (a truly top-drawer XP site), unzip it, and run the .vbs file within.  Next, right-click in an empty area of your Desktop and choose Save Desktop Icon Layout from the context menu.

Now, here's the best part.  Mess everything up!  Drag stuff here!  Drag stuff there!!  Make your Desktop look like a tornado went through it!!  Oh the wreckage!  Oh the destruction!  Oh the humanity!!  You are soooo screwed!!!… or not.

Right-click the Desktop again, this time choosing Restore Desktop Icon Layout.  And darned if order isn't restored in a fraction of a second!

Once you've got this doohickey, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

It's quick, it's small!
a snap to install!
It's free as the air!
You'll be glad that it's there!!

And in case that one proves too boring for you, there is a free program called Iconoid which will give you the same kind of gratification, only with some extras.

Note: One thing I noticed about the right-click tool is that it sometimes won't work while programs are running, such as Internet Explorer, Opera, WS_FTP, Word 2000, Outlook Express, and Mozilla.  The behavior is not consistent though, and may not be confined to the apps mentioned.  A puzzler.  Not sure if it's something peculiar to this system or more widespread.