I lost my Show Desktop icon from my taskbar in Windows. I don’t know how I lost it but I did. I must have deleted it at some point. What was I thinking?

After searching around in the windows menus and generally finding it slightly annoying for weeks I managed to find a simple solution, although one which I could never have come up with by myself.

The following is a quote form PC Magazine (just in case it ever disappears) and is very much not my own work:

The Show Desktop icon in the Quick Launch toolbar isn’t a normal shortcut. If you accidentally delete it you can’t recreate it the way you would a shortcut to a program. Instead, launch Notepad and type these lines:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file with the name Show Desktop.scf in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\ username\Application Data\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Quick Launch, where username is replaced by your actual user account name.

Maybe that’ll help someone, sometime.