Problem with icons all over my desktop

[jhick]

So I went to try out sleep mode in vista for the first time and when trying to come out of it my screens wouldnt display. So I rebooted and when I entered windows my entire desktop was covered in random icons.

I also lost the dual monitor settings I had and all display settings. Plus all my old desktop icons were piled on top of each other in the top left corner of the screen.

I am running vista 64bit with an ATI radeon 9250 card on this right now.

First thing I did was uninstall all of the old drivers from ATI and re-installed the ati 7.12 drivers (which were working before). That didn't work. I also tried a few other driver releases.

Then I tried getting windows to do it automatically using device manager. That didn't work. During this I realized both my monitors were not being recognized. So I reinstalled the drivers for one of my monitors (Samsung 731B) but could not get the acer website to work for me to download the driver for my AL2016W.

So after numerous reboots, driver installs, reinstalls, I am stumped. Help?

 

[mechBgon]

That's interesting. I can't read what the labels on the icons say. What are the filenames like? Have you tried a System Restore yet? If not, that could be an easy thing to try first (Start > type System Restore in the Search box).

 

[cubby1223]

Can't read the desktop, but I'd say when you re-installed one of the drivers, you told the setup procedure to uncompress the driver files to the desktop.

 

[jhick]

I tried a system restore. It was like this before I reinstalled the drivers. Those seem like system32 files to me. I have no idea how they would get onto the desktop just by crashing when trying to come out of sleep mode and then rebooting.

 

[mechBgon]

Click on Start > Computer and navigate to C:\Users\your username here\Desktop. Is the stuff you're seeing in that location? If so, chuck 'em into the Recycle Bin.

If for some reason your Desktop screen is showing the actual contents of the System32 directory, then you'd want to tread more cautiously, of course