Desktop icons skipping a row

[elbirth]

I try not to have very many icons on my desktop if I can help it... however I have Firefox set to download to the Desktop by default, and for my job I'm looking at a lot of PDFs, so I end up with a lot on my desktop before I delete them.

Anyway, once the first row of icons fills up, instead of starting the next row over, it skips a row, so theres a huge gap between the 2 rows. I can manually move them closer, but even then, new icons still skip that row. Just out of curiosity, I kept downloading files to see what would happen when yet another row began, and that row began in the proper place. I've tried changing from aligning them to the grid to not, to repairing permissions, etc...

I thought I saw a mention in the 10.4.7 update about desktop icons, but it still happens. I took a screenshot to show what I'm talking about:

 

[mkrishnan]

When you click on the desktop and then View -> Show View Options, have you got a "keep organized by..." option selected?

 

[elbirth]

No I don't.... I tried checking and unchecking it to see if it'd do anything, but nothing... this is how the settings look in my View Options window

Also another note- I've been having this problem for well over a month and a half or so, and about 2-3 weeks ago I reinstalled the OS and installed Bootcamp. After doing a completely clean install of OS X (no archiving of files or anything) the problem persisted.

 

[realityisterror]

Is it possible that you have some invisible files on your Desktop?
In Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
ls -a

Do you see anything that starts with a period?

Also, can you recreate the problem in another user account?

 

[elbirth]

the only hidden files that ls -a shows is .DS_Store

I know it's just an indexing type file, so I deleted it, but it didn't help the issue. I switched over to a blank user account and the problem did not show up there....

 

[realityisterror]

You can try deleting some preferences.
In ~/Library/Preferences, delete
com.apple.finder.plist
com.apple.desktop.plist

I think the second one will change your background to the default. After you delete them, log out and back in before trying again...
If that doesn't do it, then I've got no clue

 

[elbirth]

I I deleted those preference files and when I logged back in, I immediately went ahead and made my icons and icon text smaller.... and it still skipped a row. Then the fact that I made a change before doing anything else made me wonder.... so I put it back like it was, and it worked!

I played around with it some, and apparently if I make the icon text 10pt instead of 12, it skips a row... if I leave it at 12 but just make the icons smaller instead, it works like it should.....

very odd.... but at least it works now, thanks for the help!

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

I was just able to reproduce the problem on my mini.. That is odd.

 

[elbirth]

I was just able to reproduce the problem on my mini.. That is odd.

Yeah, it makes me wonder if people just don't change the font size on their icons to have not noticed this... I see screenshots of some people's Macs that have really big icons, which seriously annoys me on mine. I like them small so I can fit more on there. I always have the first row visible when I have Firefox open, so when I download something I can open it easily without having to hide FF or use Expose to get to the desktop via F11...

Having 12pt font versus 10pt isn't a huge deal, but I'd like to have it smaller and still function properly if I'd like.