How can I hide core icons from the Windows XP desktop?

A. In earlier Windows versions, you could use a variety of registry hacks or Microsoft's Tweak UI utility to hide core icons such as My Computer and Network Places from the desktop. With XP, Microsoft provides an interface in the core product that lets you accomplish the same task. To hide core icons from the desktop, perform the following steps:

To delete other icons from the desktop that you can't remove using this method, you can use the Desktop component of Tweak UI, which ships as part of Microsoft PowerToys for XP. However, remember that Microsoft doesn't support any of the PowerToys applications.