Toolbar icons

How to Create an Invisible Shortcut on Windows Desktop

It is quite easy to create any desktop shortcut of the Windows operating system invisible. The functionality of the hidden icon will not suffer: you will be able to click it, run applications, invoke the context menu and perform any other usual operations.

In this article we will deal with the Firefox shortcut for the sake of example. This shortcut is rather beautiful, but we have to choose something.

To do this, we do the following simple actions.

1. Go to shortcut properties and change the icon associated with it to transparent. It is usually included into the Shell32.dll library located in the System32 folder. If there is no transparent icon, it can be easily found in the Internet using the “blank.ico” keyword.

2. Press apply and close the settings window.

3. Rename the shortcut to get rid of its name. It is impossible to fill the name with usual spaces, but we can use non-breaking space. To do this, type 0160 on your numpad holding the Alt key (make sure that you have Num Lock turned on), then press Enter and see the following:

4. All we have is to remove the arrow from the partially hidden icon (you probably won’t need to do this in Windows XP). To do this, open the registry editor ("Start -> Run -> regedit.exe"), find the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Classes\ lnkfile branch and delete the IsShortcut parameter. Then restart your system to get the following result:

Great, isn’t it? First, now nothing prevents you from seeing the background picture. Second, it’s spectacular: you can like a magician click in the predefined areas of the desktop and launch applications, surprising your friends or colleagues. Finally, if you have Windows XP installed, you can hide directories from curious users.

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