disappearing desktops

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I have a bunch of XP machines on which the desktop backgrounds have disappeared. I have looked around on the web and tried several things suggested by several forums (checking for malware, checking for registry keys that hide the wallpaper) none of which have worked.

These desktops disappeared after we migrated to a new server environment (effectively giving each user a new user profile on their desktops.) I ran the the files and settings transfer wizard and this seems to have worked-except for the desktops on a few machines. Even more puzzling is this-when I look at the display properties the user’s chosen images are displayed-windows “thinks” that the wallpaper is being displayed, but of course it isn’t.

Any suggestions?

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The solution is to find the original backgrounds again and re-apply them. This is not too uncommon to have happen; there can be many different or default link locations that overide the default default location and its easy to break those links to the real background source with migration or RDP (where its often removed on purpose).

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I have found the desktop backgrounds and re-applied them. The desktops appear as the user is logging in, but then disappear after the login process is complete. I’ve tried running anti-malware scans, running cleandesktop.exe, checking through the registry for keys that hide the desktop, changing the desktop to some other picture (this usually does the trick when a desktop disappears) but none of these have worked.

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if you set your wallpaper via GPO, you must make sure that your user systems have access to the wallpaper files from their profile. We had a similar issue when systems were off the LAN/travelling, so we put the screen-saver and wallpaper files on the local systems for all laptops, and altered the GPO for the laptop OU to point to the local folder where they reside.

The registry settings of wallpaper settings are located in HKEY_Users, under the full length SID code for the logged in user and in Control PanelDesktop – you should have an entry for Wallpaper – a file path.

To have the wallpaper stay when they log out of when the system is sitting at the login prompt/screen – edit the same setting in the .DEFAULT profile. XP prefers .BMP files, Vista and 7 prefer .JPG images.

If the wallpaper still refuses to appear, you might need to use Autoruns or Process Explorer (tools from Sysinternals) to view the systems and see what apps or settings are being applied, could be malware over-writing the setting, also check the local policy settings.

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