Ghost icons appearing on desktop

Very recently, I have gotten over 40 ghost like icons on the desktop, intermingled with the normal icons. I have moved the regular icons to one side of my monitor with the new ones on the left side. I call them ghosts because they are somewhat blurry and the notations are difficult to read. Some titles are routine ones, but others unknown. Also two of them have a pirate and bones and are called crossbones (which I have never seen before. I have run Malwarebytes threat scan with no results, and I ran Norton Security Suite complete computer scan overnight. Norton found several pages of unwelcome items which were removed, but on rebooting, the ghosts were still there. There is no reaction when clicking in these icons, they are not movable, but when clicked on and cursor moved, lines are dragged as in a capture program, but they disappear when the mouse is stopped. Has anybody had an experience like this, and if so, how was it handled? Any help will be appreciated. If this is an unknown, I will next try a system restore. Thanks.

If you search the forum you will find instructions for deleting the icon cache. I believe that it will rebuild itself when you restart. This might solve your problem.

AndreTen said:

This is just guessing, (have seen it months ago...). Could it be, that someone messed with your background picture?

Just try to change desktop background for start...

AndreTen; You are a wizard. I HAD changed my background just a few days ago to a picture I had on my laptop. No problems for several days, so no mental link to it. Changed it back and the ghosts had left. Many thanks for your help. PS: Just for kicks, I put the picture in question back in, and the ghosts came back. All back to normal now.