How-To Geek

Sorry, but I can't stop laughing.:) Excellent writing.

No magnifier - no. I tend to flit back and forth betwixt IE, Outlook, Media Player, Visual Studio, Noteworthy Composer (music notation software), TablEdit (guitar tab editor)... and then -of course- there's the late nights of incessant snooping around to find every adjustment I can make and figure out all the bells and whistles this brand new Vista system of mine has to offer. (It wouldn't surprise me to learn that "Ok" starts to look a LOT like "Cancel" in those wee hours)

I tend to be a full-screen kinda guy... you'll RARELY find more than 1 or 2 programs windowed on my desktop at any given time (short of doin' things like copyin' files across two iterations of Windows Explorer or adressing the 46 nested dialog boxes that pop up to track down ONE stinkin' element in the Windows environment). Network Magic and Bitdefender Anti-Virus start with Windows and are always hangin' around in the system tray doin' their thing but as I mentioned before - I've never really noticed a direct connection between any particular program and this apparently arbitrary icon adjustment.

doesn't surprise me :)

Wow. Indeed you are correct and there are even more settings that affect the icon size. After 3 months, I'm still finding little corners of Vista that I haven't been to.

One way to get to these settings is: Start -> Control Panel -> Personalization -> Windows Color and Appearance -> "Open classic appearance properties for more color options" -> <deep breath> -> Appearance tab -> Advanced button -> Item drop-down -> select "Icon". <whew!> That is certainly in the bowels of the control panel and getting there is like navigating the Minotaur's Labyrinth.

Anyway, my icon size in this window is "32". This does seem to be pixels -- I zoomed in on a screen grab of my desktop and all the icons seem to fit in a 32x32 pixel area. I've never messed with this setting and now I plan to avoid it if I can. There seem to be far too many settings that affect icon size and maybe, based on your experience, they can conflict with each other!

"...it's finally happened..."

http://www.vistax64.com/genera.....hange.html

It's virtually the same in XP btw, Control Panel>Display>Appearance...

I'd like to thank everybody for their help on this one. I still don't know -specifically- what's 'causing the glitch... whether it's my advanced appearance settings conflicting with my choice of viewing "Medium Icons" vs. Classic... (blah-blah-blah...) or whether I was just haphazardly spinning the mouse wheel while unconsciously holding down the CTRL key while inadvertently paying attention to something else... ...mm-hmm. Regardless - the trick with CTRL/mousewheel will let me make quick work of getting back to "normal" when my desktop starts to creep me out again.

Much Thanks for everybody's input.

@lownoter,

Simple soloution for you..
go to your desktop, Hold Ctrl Key, and move your mouse wheel,
that will either increase or decrease your icon size depending on which direction you move the wheel!
Try it and reply with result! :)

Right click on the desktop. Select View > Classic icons

I've desperately searched for an answer to this as well, and I even found these two threads on Microsoft's official forums for this kinda stuff:

http://social.answers.microsof.....1fbc842028

http://social.answers.microsof.....83f05e1ccf

Notice how none of the techie (so-called "engineers") do absolutely nothing to address the real problem and instead provide the copy+paste instructions for how to change icon size. One of them even says to try doing a "clean boot" which is totally pointless, because this is a problem with Vista even before you begin to tinker with settings and installing 3rd party software.

For what it's worth, here I'll copy my own report of this problem here that I had posted in one of those threads:

Here is what I think part of the problem is: there are actually 3 ways to change icon size, which are the two listed above and also one other in the Advanced Appearance Settings.

With three things vying for control over desktop icon size, it's no wonder that Vista will "hiccup" once in a while and temporarily reset the icon sizes to look smaller.

When this "hiccup" occurs, give the desktop focus, hit F5 to refresh the desktop and voila, the icons will go right back to the size you had set them at.

The "hiccup" will keep happening at random times when the Explorer process seems to kinda "refresh" itself... I'm not sure what is really happening, but that's how it appears to me. So, no matter what you keep trying to force the icon size to, it will occasionally reset to a smaller size (temporarily until you either restart, hit F5, or force another size change).

I've experienced this in Vista Home Premium 32bit and Vista Ultimate 32bit, and I've found zero solutions to this. Only a few other people have had the brains and guts to notice this and actually post about it, it's such an insignificant problem.

I tripple dog double quadruple dare you to find out why this glitch keeps happening. Beat up a couple of MS techies if you have to, it's worth it.