And as a follow-up to my first reply in this thread: The "Save Desktop Icon Layout" dll from the (very old - perhaps 2000?) Windows Resource Kit still works, and works correctly, in Windows 7. It's essentially the same thing as DesktopOK.

Regarding Windows 7: I agree that it's just more window dressing on the same old OS. But I will say that it seems to be slightly better about preserving desktop icon layouts than XP was. In XP, if I logged in remotely with a smaller-resolution computer, the icons would still be rearranged to the smaller resolution when I logged in locally again. With Windows 7, when I log in locally, the icons are still in the larger resolution layout, just the way I left them.