it might have affected the picture you are using for your wallpaper try choosing a new wallpaper and see if that square goes away. also check your wallpaper settings to see how it is set to portray your wallpaper. It is better to get an actual wallpaper that is sized for your monitor resolution, this site will automatically determine your proper size, once you select a wallpaper click on it to go to the download page there you will see where it says your resolution is and has the number, for example mine is 1280x1024 where you see that click on that number and it will automatically size it for your screen then right click on the sized image and save it to your pc, then go to your wallpaper area and browse to that saved file and select it as your wallpaper. That way we can see just what is happening. Wallpaper Abyss

is this a game you have on your pc or a link to the actual website? if it is a game you have on the pc then go to the game itself in start all programs and right click on it and create shortcut and select desktop as the destination.

Perhaps if you had an extremely ridiculous amount of icons on the Desktop it would effect your startup. However, in general they are of little concern. The main negative would be the active applications they could represent. These applications are the ones being initialized during startup and are all-too-often not needed as they can easily be accessed on-demand through the Start Menu. It seems today every time you install an application it wants to install a Desktop icon, a Quick Launch icon and a Start menu entry. This for the average user is over kill. Personally I have only four on my Desktop and two are pointed to the Recycle Bin and one I created for Windows Explorer. On my Quick Launch I have Windows Mail, Firefox and IE8. Everything else I can readily access from the Start Menu, and I like looking at my grandchildren a lot better than DT clutter. DA

Maybee your IE is still there and you can use it at any time even with firefox open they work fine together, all you do is just click on the big blue IE icon on your desktop and it will open your IE browser do the same for firefox just click the firefox icon and it will open firefox. Which ever one you want to use you just click it's button. If you have the firefox icon on the desktop you can just grab it with your mouse hold down the button and drag the icon down there to the quick launch bar where your other icons are then let go and it should create a new icon for you down there too. When you want to go to the windows update site to get any windows updates you will have to do that using your IE browser because Microsoft will not accept firefox. That is the only place I ever use my IE now, I use firefox for everything else. This will not at all affect your Windows updates if you have them set to do automatically or to notify you. Only if you want to go to the actual windows update webpage then you need to click on your IE icon and use it. Your windows update notifier is not tied to your browser at all so this will not change that at all you will still see that update notifier the same as before. To do any updates for firefox itself it will occasionally check automatically for updates and if it finds some it will pop up and tell you that it has found an update for your firefox or for any add ons you may have then you click ok to let it do the updates, it will then tell you it has to restart firefox (not the whole pc just firefox) say ok and it will shut down firefox then re-open it and the updates will be installed automatically. Have you managed to get your home page set up on firefox now? If not what you need to do is just go to the webpage that you want to use as your home page, for example if you wanted to use this forum, while you are on the website here you would click up top tools> options then on the main tab there you will see where you have the options for setting your home page, just select the one that says use current page, that will set the page you are currently on as your home page, anytime you want to change it just go to the page you want to set and do the same thing again. You will want to in that same Options box click on the tabs tab and in there make sure these are selected, new pages should be opened in a NEW TAB then there are 4 options below that and you want to make sure the top 3 are selected. If you need to change the font type or the size of the fonts on the pages you can change that in Options >content tab When you want to clear your cache on firefox you go to Options> privacy then at the bottom is your option to clear the cache, when you click that it gives you more options/settings on exactly what you want it to clear, I always have mine clear cache and download history. you can also clear the cache by clicking on Tools > clear private data. Once you get the hang of firefox and start trying some of the wonderful add ons that are available for it you will wonder why you did not try it sooner.