The Show the Desktop Icon (and how to restore it when it vanishes)

If you are like me, you often have more than one application open at once (and sometimes so many their names are barely legible in your task-bar). An irritating aspect of working like this is that you sometimes need to open a folder that is easiest accessed via your desktop but of course you cannot see it because of all your open applications.

If you haven't discovered it already, the 'Show the Desktop' icon is your best friend. One click and all open applications are tabbed down to your task-bar for easy access; when you are finished with your desktop, a second click restores everything back to being open again, in the order and location you had it open in.

The 'Show the Desktop' icon is generally located in the cluster of icons on your task-bar, next to your start button, see picture. If you don't have a small cluster of icons next to your start button, right click your task-bar, select 'toolbars' and then 'quicklaunch' and it will become visible.
To the right of your cluster of quick-launch icons there is a small double arrow (it is visible just below the word "Shortcut" in the picture above). Right clicking this will show you all the icons you can quick-launch (so called because a single click opens each instead of the usual two). You can drag and drop your three most used applications onto the task-bar and order them as you want by dragging them around. As you can see looking at mine my top three are Explorer [I am sorry, I just do not like Fire Fox], Outlook and Show the Desktop.

There is, however, a problem that can arise with one's 'Show the Desktop' icon; it can mysteriously vanish. Just when you cannot imagine how you ever coped without it it isn't there and you have to manually tab down every page again. So frustrating! There are varying theories as to why this happens but the most useful piece of information to know is how to restore it.

I have tried various options over the years when ours has vanished but it always would vanish again a few days later. A few months back I tried a very simple piece of code and it has never vanished since. This works for XP users, and is not scary I promise!

Open a notepad or other plain text document.
Copy and paste the following into it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]Command=ToggleDesktop

Select: Save as
In the file name type: Show Desktop.scf
Ensure save as type is showing: 'plain text' or 'text documents'
Save it wherever you want it.
Then drag it from wherever it is onto the Quick-launch bar.

That's it.

(You can just memorise the keyboard command 'windows key + d' or 'windows key + m' but I think one click is more efficient than having to hit two keys - less to remember anyway!)