GeekSpeak

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Just spent entirely too long fixing this problem:

“For some reason my “desktop” tab has gone [in my Display Properties on Windows Xp Home]!! I can’t change my wallpaper!
whys that? can I get it back?”

Duh, registry hack, right? Well, turns out it’s not a key that was changed or one that was removed — if you google this you’ll find a few things for disabling Active Desktop tabs and such which gives you pretty little regkeys like “NoDispScrSavPage”. It’s that the following key was added:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
  CurrentVersion\Policies\System\Wallpaper

I deleted the file, but left the key. 90 minutes later I got the bright idea to actually remove the key, and voila, the display properties had an active desktop tab again (as opposed to being greyed out).

Hopefully this helps someone out there.

Keywords: disable, enable, desktop tab, display properties, windows xp, spyware leftovers, residuals, registry hacks, fucked up computer, where did my tulips go, oh my god is it 3am.