Script for Shortcut Icon Deletion from the Desktop

During Windows client preparation, most of the corporate programs I work with create a shortcut icon on the user's desktop.

I prefer to maintain a computer clean of programs used infrequently. For example, Adobe Reader and other viewers normally are executed from a folder or e-mail attachement, not by launching the program from a shortcut on the desktop.

For this reason in my installation process I have a list of shortcut icons to remove from the desktop.

The traditional way to remove a shortcut icon is to drag it to the Recycle Bin or press the Delete key.

But I've found using a process is the best way to automatically remove these pesky icons for you.

In this example I decided to remove the PDFCreator shortcut. It is normally created during installation in the All User Profile folder.

In the DS console is created a job called "Remove desktop icon" with a simple script as follows:

DEL /Q "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop\PDFCreator.LNK" > NUL

In this example the icon PDFCreator is removed in a quiet mode from All Users profile. It takes just seconds and the deletion is done.