Fix to remove Sony Ericsson Desktop Icon

A good friend of mine recently brought her mobile with her and connected it to my computer. The phone was the Sony Ericsson W810i and I had to install the software for the mobile that I downloaded from the official homepage.

Everything worked fine until I uninstalled the Sony Ericsson PC suite again and realized that the desktop icon was not removed during the uninstallation. The icon was only used to launch the application suite and it felt strange that the program uninstaller did not remove it with the rest of the software.

I tried to delete the icon by selecting it and hitting Delete and was puzzled that the file was still on my desktop afterwards. Right-clicking the icon revealed that many menu entries were missing. There was no way to delete the file or take a look at the properties. Moving the icon into the recycle bin had no effect as well.

It used a protection similar to the one used by the Windows Recycle Bin as you cannot uninstall or delete it as well from the desktop that easily.

After some frantic researching on the internet I found a way to delete the icon directly in the Windows Registry.

The icon - and many others for that matter - is located under the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\.

The key was {A5110426-177D-4e08-AB3F-785F10B4439C} but may be different for your icon. All I had to do was to delete the complete key (starting with A5..) and restart the computer afterwards for the change to take effect.

Finally, after restarting the computer, the icon was no longer on my desktop. Hope this helps everyone else who is having troubles with the Sony Ericsson icon or icons from other companies as well on their system.

Advertisement