Just by coincidence, when I closed Word a little bit ago, all my icons and my wallpaper disappeared momentarily. They came back after a bit, but the icons looked a little fuzzy - missing some color.

Of course, my first thought was - you can get it from Sorcha just by talking about it! (I mean the icon problem guys, don't get excited.)

What happened in my case was that the temp files that Word had open didn't clear when Word closed (about 45MB worth). Disk Cleanup didn't find them and remove them. The excess 45MB of temps, on top of Windows' normal load, was enough to make the desktop reload "stumble."

Everything back to normal after I manually deleted the temp files that were in the folders where I had been working.

It would be worthwhile to go to root C:\ and search for "*.tmp" and "~*.*" just to be sure this isn't part of the icon problem.

Windows will not allow you to delete a temp file that's being used, so it's safe to try deleting (in Win Explorer) any .tmp that you find on your machine. The bigger problem is that if you select several files, and one of them can't be deleted, it aborts and doesn't delete any of them; so you have to try them one at a time to be sure you get all the "dead" ones.

I got there (this time) by merging 7 documents totalling 218MB all into one doc, so that I could edit it back down to something smaller to use elsewhere (it ended up - for now, at a little under 2MB when I quit). This is one of those "don't try this at home, kids" things. Officially - it says so in Word Help - the maximum document size that Word can handle is 32MB, although I do have several "in process" over 40MB, and a couple near 80MB. - and I write such tight, terse prose(?)

John