Preventing upgrades from installing shortcuts on Windows 7 Home

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Can you block installers from making desktop shortcuts?

How can I prevent installers and upgrades from summarily dropping shortcuts into the Public Desktop on Windows 7 Home?

Every time I update iTunes or firefox or acroread or flash or the gimp or whatever-needs-frequent-updating, the update litters everyone's desktop by placing a shortcut in C:\Users\Public\Desktop.

I do not recall this behavior under XP. Instead, most installers would give the option to add a Desktop icon or not. So far, however, I haven't been given that choice under Windows 7. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

I use a little VB script to just move the icons to each user's desktop instead of to the Public one. I'm sure there's a better way to get each user's name, but I just hardcoded it. It will still put icons on each user's profile, but at least each person can choose whether or not they have it.

Copy the following into Notepad and save to your desktop as a ".vbs" file. Change the Users to match the Users of the computer. And change the "dim User(4)" line to be the number of users you have. If you put yourself as User(1) it will open your Desktop Folder after it copies the icons so you can delete any you don't want. When you have new icons just double click on it and they'll be moved out of the "Public" folder.

Dim ObjFso
Dim StrSourceLocation
Dim StrDestinationLocation
Dim StrSourceFileName
Dim StrDestinationFileName
dim objFileCopy
dim file
dim Users(4)
dim i
Dim SH, txtFolderToOpen 

StrSourceLocation = "C:\Users\Public\Desktop"
Users(1) = "Brian"
Users(2) = "Danny"
Users(3) = "Cory"
Users(4) = "Jess"

on error Resume Next

for i = 1 to 4

    StrDestinationLocation = "C:\Users\" & Users(i) & "\Desktop"

    'All text files will be copied to destination
    StrSourceFileName = "*.*"

    'Creating the file system object
    Set ObjFso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

    'Copying the file
    ObjFso.CopyFile StrSourceLocation & "\" & StrSourceFileName, StrDestinationLocation & "\" , True
    if err.Number <> 0 then
        Msgbox "No files to move"
        WScript.Quit
    end if
Next

Set ObjFso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
For Each file In ObjFso.GetFolder(StrSourceLocation).Files
    file.delete
Next

Set SH = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application") 
txtFolderToOpen = "C:\Users\" & users(1) & "\Desktop"
SH.Explore txtFolderToOpen 
Set SH = Nothing 

Answer 2

I think this is just coincidence; the behavior shouldn't have changed in Win7. It's still controlled by the installers. I certainly haven't seen it happening.