Why can I sometimes not drag icons to a supposedly empty spot on my Mac OS X desktop?

Question

I'm using align to grid. There's an icon. There's an empty space. I drag from icon to empty space. It bounces back to its original spot as though there were an icon in the empty space. But there's not! WHY?? Thanks. (Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6)

Answer 1

Thanks to Theo Belk--I tried changing the text size and each time the text size was changed encountered some form of the drag issue. What I think is happening is that when the size is changed, the icons that are already in some place on the desktop sometimes stay there, instead of being moved to their new correct grid locations. Therefore what appears to be an empty spot next to one of them is actually supposed to be occupied, or vice versa.

Solution: after changing text size, drag all icons anywhere--even back into their current location--and they will re-align and re-snap-to-grid. Then other icons can be dragged next to them as per usual.

Answer 2

I've seen this happen sometimes when the text size in the desktop's View Options is set larger than 12 pt. and arrange by Snap to Grid is enabled. Try reducing the text size. Simply enlarging the grid spacing doesn't seem to work.

Answer 3

Philip is right. The empty space is caused by an unobservable reason: there are some icons seems to stay in a grid but actually not. They are only several millimeters away from their grid. But once one icon leaves its grid, it occupies two or even more grids and other icons can't fit into their position. Philip means you need to drag everything to a position after modifying everything.(I recommend putting everything on the left side and drag them to the right side one by one) Once you change spacing, canceling "snap to grid", or change text size, icon size, you need to do it again.