Disable the desktop cleanup wizard

Occasionally you will find yourself with a large number of shortcuts, files, folders etc on your desktop and it can become difficult to sort your way through them all (you know what I’m talking about. Fortunately Windows was thinking of us and has provided an assistant that will run every 60 days to see if there are any desktop shortcuts that can be removed due to inactivity.

This wizard will try and arrange things for you and will offer to remove all the icons that have not been used for 60 days to a new folder called “Unused Desktop Shortcuts”, which will be directly located on your desktop. It’s a nice feature, right? Personally, I find this information bubble annoying, even if I don’t have to see it very often; I would rather that it didn’t appear at all.

Here’s how you can disable the information bubble:

Click “Start”, “Run” and type “control desk.cpl, Desktop, 0”. Press “OK” and you will have access to the “Desktop” tab on your Display properties.

Click on the [Customise Desktop] button.

You will need to uncheck the “Run Desktop Cleanup wizard every 60 days” box as you can see in the following capture:

There are two things that you should note:

• You have the possibility of running the assistant manually if you think that it can help you by simply clicking on the [Clean Desktop] button.

• It is not possible to change the default 60 days as this is set by default. After all, who could tolerate a reminder only every 6 month ;-) Of course it is possible to change this time directly in the registry and we will see how this is possible.

Click “Start”, “Run” and type “Regedit”. Click “OK” and you will see the Windows Registry open in front of you.

Go to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
Desktop\CleanupWiz

Add a new DWORD value called Days Between Clean Up and give this a value of “180” (in this example it will appear every 6 months being 180 days). Be careful, you will need to select the Decimal box otherwise the value entered will be considered as hexadecimal and does not represent the same value. See the following screen capture:

Press OK and close the Registry Editor.

Now you will have either disabled or modified the time delay stated to run the Desktop Clean up wizard.