XP Icon Annoyance is Wearing Out My Patience

I like to arrange the icons on my desktop in a certain way (typically with application shortcuts on the left and document shortcuts on the right). To keep the icons where I put them, I check "align to grid" and uncheck "autoarrange".

Well, there is this quirk in Windows XP. After months and months of living with it, it's really starting to piss me off. The quirk is that desktop icons move around the desktop after a reboot or relogin (and, in a Sisyphean effort, I move them back). The strangest part is that not all icons move. Just some.

At first I thought it was just me, but I've searched the web and found countless others complaining about the same problem. It seems that nobody has a good solution. There are basically two camps:

Camp #1: These people tell you how to fix the problem you don't have. "Oh, this is easy to fix, just right click your destkop and uncheck "autoarrange". Um, that's not the fracking problem! This answer is sometimes provided even when it is cleary stated in the problem that autoarrange is not checked. Grr.

Camp #2: These people tell you to install a 3rd party application that can save/restore icon positions on the desktop. While, technically, this probably works, I am not going to risk a 3rd party utility of unknown origin just to keep my icons happily aligned.

How about Microsoft just tuck a fix for this into the next patch?