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Q: Up to now, my husband had his desktop about half covered with icons. One day we noticed that the whole desktop was covered with icons. Original icons were duplicated and scattered randomly, and it remains in that condition.  What could cause this, and is it the result of some malicious activity?  Should we take action to correct this? 

– Nancy L.
Shalimar, Fla

A: Your question actually made me smile, Nancy.  No, this is not the result of some nefarious malware invading your computer, although I can certainly see how it might appear that way.  Rather, the likely cause is some errant mouse and keyboard activity.  Do you have any very young kids that use your computer?  The kind of keyboard and mouse interaction that they like to engage in while playing can easily cause something like this (thanks, Bill).  You can try this if you want – it’s perfectly safe, and the worst that will happen is that you’ll have to delete some file copies.  Here’s what I think happened.  Somewhere on your desktop, between the icons, press AND HOLD the left mouse button, then drag the mouse around.  Depending on which version of Windows you’re running, you’ll see either a “rubber band” box, or a semi-transparent box.  Any icons that this box touches become selected.  Once you have some icons selected, let go of the mouse button.  Now, press AND HOLD the mouse button on one of the selected icons, and drag.  Notice that all the icons move together.  Now, without releasing the mouse button, press and hold the Ctrl key.  Notice the little plus sign that appears?  That means when you drag the selected icons with the mouse and drop them, rather than just moving them, you are making a copy of them.  This function is intended to be used when you are copying files to another location, but as you can see, Windows doesn’t care if you drop them in the same location – it just makes new files and adds “Copy of” to the front or “ – Copy” to the end of the file name.  The only action you need to take is to delete the copies and try to stop it from happening again.

Q: I have a situation in which I need to amend over 100 case folders by adding a named sub-folder to each. I know how to put a bunch of folders into one folder but have not been able to figure out how to put one folder into a bunch of folders except using the copy-paste function. (PC w/WinXP). Can this be done? If so, how? 

– Crystal G.
Baker, Fla

A: This can be done, Crystal, but it’s pretty geeky.  Buried below Windows’ graphical interface, all the old DOS commands of days gone-by are still lurking.  The old DOS “for” command was designed to do exactly what you want.  That is, it performs the same operation on multiple files or directories.  Using Notepad, or some other text editor, create a file of any name you like, with the extension .bat.  Put the following line in the file, replacing <new folder> with the name of the folder you want to create:

for /f %%s in ('dir /ad/b') do MD "%%s\<new folder>"