How do I go back to the original desktop icons?

If youve accidentally reset your custom desktop icons layout by enabling Auto-arrange or by hitting a wrong key sequence, here is a neat trick to revert back to the original position.

Desktop icons layout remains in the memory until you initiate a logoff. During user account logoff or when restarting Explorer cleanly, the desktop icons position is saved to the registry.

To quickly revert to the original icon positions during the current logon session, forcible kill and restart the Explorer.exe process. To do that, press Win+ R to launch the Run dialog, type the following command, and press Enter:

The above command works in all versions and editions of Windows. In Windows Pro editions, alternately, you can also use this command:

This closes all folder windows, kills Explorer shell, and restarts it. The last saved desktop icons position [written during the previous logoff] is now applied. Of course, this would work only if youve inadvertently changed the desktop icon layout during the current logon session.

Note that cleanly exiting Explorer wont help in this case, as it would save the current desktop icons layout to the registry.