SAN FRANCISCO – The “show desktop” icon disappeared from Rusparadox’s Quick Launch toolbar. He asked the Answer Line Forum how to get it back.

Once again, I have different directions for XP and Vista.

XP:

Select Start, the Run. Type regsvr32 /n /i:u shell32.dll, then press ENTER. A little dialog box will tell you that the process succeeded.

Unfortunately, the icon still won’t be in the toolbar. To put it back there, either reboot or:

Select Start, then Run, type “%appdata%\microsoft\internet explorer\quick launch” (include the quotes), and press ENTER. This will bring up the contents of the Quick Launch bar as a folder. Drag the Show Desktop icon (which was recreated from that first command you tried) to the actual Quick Launch bar.

Vista:

Download ShowDesktop.zip from howtogeek.com (and thank you to those good geeks for showing me this trick). Open the zip file, and drag the only file in it to the Quick Launch bar.

Read the original forum discussion at http://forums.pcworld.com/message/168712.

Add your comments to this article below. If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.