The possibility of suppressing app desktop icons

[rpodric]

I know it's up to the given app as to whether this happens, but a significant percentage do. It wouldn't be practical to approach this in an app-specific way, if that's even possible, since there are just too many. Given that, is there some way of perhaps deleting them after update if they were created (not via Task Scheduler, but as part of WAU as it knows what was just updated)? Or any other approach, really. Just brainstorming here.

[KnifMelti]

Yes, it is possible.
Hi, and thanks for reaching out!

• Copy the mods\_WAU-mods-postsys-template.ps1 to mods\_WAU-mods-postsys.ps1
• Edit the mods\_WAU-mods-postsys.ps1
• Under <# ARRAYS/VARIABLES #> add: the shortcuts to be deleted

#Beginning of Desktop Link Name to Remove - optional wildcard (*) after, without .lnk, multiple: "lnk1","lnk2"
$Lnk = @("4K Video Downloader","Acrobat Read*","Arduino IDE","Audacity","Beyond Compare*","Bitwarden","calibre*","Cisco Webex Meetings","EV3 Classroom","Firefox","FreeCAD*","GanttProject","GIMP *","Google Earth Pro", "Inkscape", "KeePass*","Kleopatra","LightBurn","Logitech*","Mp3tag","NTLite","NVIDIA","OBS Studio","Oracle VM VirtualBox","PeaZip","Plantronics Hub","VLC media player","WinSCP")

• Uncomment:

<# MAIN #>
# if ($Lnk) {
#     $removedCount = Remove-ModsLnk $Lnk
#     Write-ToLog "-> Removed $($removedCount) Public Desktop Links!" "Green"
# }

[rpodric]

Oh, that's interesting, maintaining a list of known apps which do this (though I didn't think Firefox was one of them, and anyway isn't it one that WAU deliberately excludes?).

I wonder if this could someday be bolted into WAU so it could just be enabled (or not) upon install (and, I guess, the app list of known offenders could then be auto-updated periodically). Thanks!

[KnifMelti]

FF does it and as i included FF to update (decreasing the MS Defender vulnerability status for my company) this has improved our status a lot!
This is the way it works nowadays!

[rpodric]

An alternative might be (this for bat but it could also be done in ps) putting this in TaskSched to run upon login. I was looking to avoid a task but it wouldn't require any upkeep. Could be delayed a few minutes to allow for any updates that may occur.

DEL /F /Q "C:\Users\Public\Desktop\*.lnk"

[rpodric]

That's good to know that it's possible as is, though there must be some key difference here aside from your having more files for it to handle (that definitely shouldn't be it). Win10 vs. Win11 shouldn't be it either.

I'm assuming by "SYSTEM/user" you're referring to UAC elevation, which necessarily occurs. But you seem to be talking two different things here. What other way is there? A standard user (no elevation) shouldn't be what you mean. Maybe the answer to this is the reason that it works for you.

[KnifMelti]

Admin user and run as SYSTEM via Nirsoft AdvancedRun

[rpodric]

Do you happen to have UAC disabled by any chance?

I tried that, didn't help. What did: running the bat from the command-line (in admin cmd, of course). Now, if you say you weren't doing this, I'll be very confused. I'm trying to get it, or the equivalent, to work via Explorer.

[KnifMelti]

Nope, UAC is always on.
As Administrator. Command prompt:

[KnifMelti]

But, I just noticed (as in #1064 (comment)) that it doesn't work if it's located on a share...

[JonathanPitre]

UniGetUI now supports this feature btw, it may be worth peaking at their code.

[KnifMelti]

Will do.