Desktop Problems

[Charles Martin]

> From: "Chris Walker" <chris at mymac.demon.co.uk>
>
> For some reason my Desktop is suddenly unable to remember the positions
> of the attached hard drives and at each login these now appear in 
> random
> positions on the desktop  - seldom twice in the same place.
>
> I have tried repairing permissions but this made no difference.
>
> Does anyone know what causes this and how to cure it?

Yes, I know what causes it and how to cure it.

Here's the root of the problem: there is an invisible grid in Mac OS X 
that the icons align to when you select "clean up" or "snap to grid." 
This grid is set very wide to accomodate those large lovely icons, but 
for those of us more comfortable with smaller icons (mine are 40x40, 
slightly larger than the OS 9 icons), it's annoying.

There is (imho) a bug in this design because the grid freaks out if you 
MANUALLY place an item too close to another item that is REQUIRED to be 
on the grid (like drives, CD icons, removable drives etc). IOW, the 
problem is that you have some item on your desktop that is sitting too 
close to the drive icons. Move the offending item(s) far away from the 
drive icons and they will stop "moving."

_Chas_

Have you noticed that this administration's harshest critics are ... 
lifelong Republicans?
Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neil, John McCain, Scott Ritter, John Dean ... 
and the list goes on ...