Various Odd Problems.

I disabled them and restarted explorer.exe (with task manager).

I suspect there's some sort of database or cache issue here. I have a really fast SSD, and (most) things take no time to load. However, restarting explorer.exe made the taskbar icons (for active windows) take a lot longer than usual (it also hung the start menu).

As for installed applications, yes. Many.

Maybe the culprits are some video codecs I had to help with importing some video into a couple of older programs?

I'd take a stab in the dark and say it's more likely to be some shell extension that I have.

I see the Desktop rearranging at times and have to keep in mind the screen is Dynamic, not Static like a picture on the wall. Dynamic means it is constantly redrawing/refreshing, sometimes stays the same way for long periods, sometimes not so much. Since File Explorer and Internet Explorer seem to be well-integrated I don't think such changes can be completely avoided.

Yes, it redrawing itself is fine. However, when it overlays odd things (I didn't capture it in time, but I just had the Audacity program icon overlayed over every single shortcut on the dekstop), I don't want that. I'm going to go through a couple of things and disable them, to see if I can reach a fix.

It’s like a program is trying to associate itself with stuff on your desktop.

I hate to sound like a support person over at the MS answers forum but in this case, maybe performing a clean boot will help. If the problem goes away, then enable startup apps one by one until you find the offending application.

How to perform a clean boot

1. Press the "Windows + R" key to open a Run box.
2. Type msconfig and click OK.
3. On the General tab, click Selective startup.
4. Clear the Load startup items check box.
5. Click the Services tab.
6. Select the Hide all Microsoft services check box (at the bottom).
7. Click Disable all.
8. Click the Startup tab.
9. Click Open Task Manager.
10. On the Startup tab, right-click each enabled startup item and select Disable.
11. Click OK.
12. Click Restart.

How to rebuild icon cache:

Clear and Reset Thumbnail Cache in Windows 10 Customization Tutorials


About the green check marks on your icons..

https://superuser.com/questions/9578...-desktop-icons

Thank you for your responses.

I keep as many things from starting up as possible in general, so the fix isn't there.

I've found a couple of shell extensions with ShellExView that might be causing this. "Icaros" installed alongside (as a dependency, I assume) to some other software. It's not actually an install though, it's just a couple of libraries and utilities that have registered themselves as "thumbnail handler"s. I've disabled them, and I'll post when I can confirm that the issue has stopped.

Any updates? Would like to know what caused it.

Yes. I used ShellExView ( http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html) to have a look for any programs which were handling thumbnails.

I found these three entries that I didn't recognise:

(link to image: https://puu.sh/yzf2v/1ad739979b.png )

These came installed alongside a codec pack.

After clearing/rebuilding the icon cache and restarting, it seems to be fixed.

This seemed to prevent an error too (Code: -2147219200). It's also fixed the slow loading of icons in folders.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing your fix :)