[Guide] How to remove solid background of desktop icons

Desktop icons with blue background color looks so bad and annoying. It makes desktop look tacky with lot of irritating blue color splashed on beautiful desktop wallpaper. You can easily remove this background color from desktop icons and make the background transparent.

It really sucks if you have a cool looking wallpaper as a background, but all your icons have large dark blue borders. Instead, if the text looks like it’s written right onto the wallpaper, the effect is much nicer.

Therefore here is the guide shown you how to get rid of those blue color background from desktop icons.

Guide
Step 1: First, may right click My Computer -> Propesties, or open the Control Panel and click on System.

Step 2: Now click on the Advanced tab and click on the Settings button under the Performance section.

Step 3: Finally, scroll down and check the Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop box.

That’s it! Now all of your desktop icons will have the blue backgrounds removed and will appear transparent.

Now doesn’t that look much better! Sure does to me!
Desktop icon background is set to transparent by default in Windows Vista and Windows 7, so you don’t have that problem in those operating systems. Enjoy!

Reference:
http://elechub.com/how-to-remove-blue-background-behind-desktop-icons/
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-xp-tips/desktop-icons-transparent-background/
http://itview.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/how-to-remove-the-background-color-of-the-desktop-icons/
http://www.techf5.com/827/remove-solid-background-color-from-desktop-icons/

How to re-create the Show desktop icon on the Quick Launch toolbar

To re-create the Show desktop icon by yourself, you may follow these method:


Method 1: Manually re-create the Show Desktop Icon

1. Click Start, click Run, type notepad in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Carefully copy and then paste the following text into the Notepad window: [Shell] Command=2 IconFile=explorer.exe,3 [Taskbar] Command=ToggleDesktop
3. On the File menu, click Save As, and then save the file to your desktop as "Show desktop.scf" (with quotes, in order to prevent Notepad from appending .txt extension) The Show desktop icon is created on your desktop.
4. Click and then drag the Show desktop icon to your Quick Launch toolbar.

Method 2: Using the Regsvr32 command

1. Click Start, Run and type the following command:
regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32.dll
2. The Show Desktop icon file should be available now.

Method 3: Copy the file from another user account

Every user account will have a copy of Show Desktop.scf file. Search for the file named Show Desktop.scf in your computer by logging in as administrator. Copy it to your user profile path here:

%Appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

(Type the above path in Start, Run dialog)

Reference:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/190355
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/showdesktop.htm