I have noticed that my icons rebuild on my desktop after I either run a program, open a folder, or link off of the internet. The icons are not duplicating themselves, they are just blinking off then reappearing where their location is on the desktop. Some icons take a little longer to reappear (maybe a couple of seconds) and I have noticed that the area that the icons are located it shows in that space a document icon (folded page with an "e" in the middle). This does not occur all the time. Very Strange! Is there anything I can do to eliminate this?

try a diff monitor refresh rate

Delete the "ShellIconCache" file which is located in the c:\windows folder. It will be rebuilt after shutdown/restart. If that doesn't work, try this, from http://www.beemerworld.com/tips/maxthrash.htm (I have mine set to 1000) To reduce your hard drive thrashing and decrease the potential delay you might experience when you right-click to bring up a context menu or a dialog box and to avoid a permanent refresh of your Desktop icons, open Regedit and go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer Look in the right hand pane for the "Max Cached Icons"entry. Create it if not present: right-click in Regedit's right hand pane and select New, String Value. Name it "Max Cached Icons" (the spaces are required, but don't type the quotes). The default value is 500, which means the maximum number of icons that are cached by the OS. The information about all Win9x cached icons is held in the ShellIconCache file, located in your Windows folder. Every time you create a new Desktop/Start Menu folder/shortcut, this file is updated, until it reaches the (default) upper limit of 500 icons. But you can increase this number to allow Windows to cache more icons, and to force it to stop accessing your disk(s) frequently, only to search for those "uncached" icons. You need to restart your machine after this change, sometimes 2 or more times, until the new setting "catches on". According to a MSKB article, the maximum size allowed for "Max Cached Icons" is 2000.

If, by any chance, you do what has already been suggested and you are one of those unlucky ones who's shelliconfile file is most reluctant to rebuild (symptoms very slow rebuild of icons and desktop and long boot delay), do this: Empty your bin. Go to c:\windows\desktop and delete all the "shortcut" icons (not any that are actual programs). In most cases only "shortcuts" appear in that folder. Keep them in the bin then reboot. Once Windows has arrived then Restore them out of the bin back onto your desktop. This "jolt" usually causes shelliconcache to rebuild. I've found it far more reliable than MS's Safe Mode method. Derek.W