The Ohio State University

With the various system problems we’ve been having lately, some of us are not getting our full complement of desktop icons when we log in to our user accounts. What we’ve been seeing is that your ZEN launched icons, those with the red arrows, don’t show up. [Please be sure you’ve waited until your ZEN launcher icon has changed from a whirling circle to a static rectangle (grey with a red line at the top). As long as this icon is continuing to whirl, it’s still trying to pull your icons across the network.]

Before doing any of the steps below:
Please check and make sure you’ve got your network drives! (Go out to Windows Explorer and check that you can "see" T:\, U:\, W:\, Y:\, etc.) Since your icons pull across the network from the server, if you don’t have access to your network drives, you won’t get your icons. If you don’t have access to your network drives, you’ll have to re-start your pc. When you log back in, make sure you are not logging in in "Workstation Only" mode! (Workstation Only means just that, no network connections at all, so you automatically won’t get your network drives.)

Here are a couple of things you can try:

1. Auto Arrange your existing icons:

Sometimes all of our icons are there, they’re just "stacked up" on top of each other and you can’t see them. Using your mouse, point to a blank space on your desktop and right click. From the resulting pop-up box, select arrange icons and then auto arrange. The icons you have will re-arrange themselves in columns starting at the left hand side of your screen. (If you want to re-arrange your icons, repeat the above steps to turn off auto arrange and then drag your icons to where you want them. Please note that this icon placement may not stick from login to login.)

2. If Auto Arrange doesn’t work:

You can try to "force" launch the NAL desk software:

• Go to your Task Manager (Control+Alt+Delete and then click on Task List), and look at the  Processes  you have running.
  

• Click on the grey box around "image name" [example may not appear grey in some browsers] to sort these processes into alphabetical order. NOTE: most of these entries are "behind the scenes" stuff and need to be running for your pc to work properly!

• Scroll down until you get to the listing for  naldesk.exe  and then highlight it. Once you have it highlighted, click the "End Process" box. (If you don’t have a listing for  naldesk.exe  don’t worry about it. Skip ahead to the next part. )

• You’ll get a response of:
  

• Click on Yes. You’ll notice that you no longer have a listing for  naldesk  in your active processes list. (Which is what you want at this point in time.) Go ahead and close the task manager.

Click on Start and then Run:

In the resulting box type  naldesk  and then hit Enter or click OK. Your Novell Application launcher should re-launch and bring in a copy of your desktop icons:

3. If all else fails, re-boot your pc and try logging in again. (Note: We’ve usually had to do this multiple times to get the icons to appear.)

Document last revised 06/09/03 dac

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