Win 10 Icon Highlights

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I started a previous thread: Win 10 icon highlights missing
Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Larry Dunn, Nov 26, 2017.

The question asked there is an important one, I think.

It's about the behavior of Windows when you run an application from the Desktop.

I pointed out that in Windows up to Win 10, the icon would be highlighted when you click on it, and it would retain that highlight afterward. The user could then use the Down cursor to highlight the application underneath the current one, and that one would also retain its highlight after the application ran. In that way, a fixed set of applications can be run one after another, with the mouse-click needed on the first item only. I use this to run an anti-malware program, then Spybot, and then CCleaner. I purposely stack up the icons to make this extremely easy.

The problem is that the behavior is inconsistent. Win 10 did not save the highlights. Then it did, for several months. Now it doesn't.

Not only that, I run several systems with Win 7, and they have stopped saving the highlights, in the same period in which Win 10 stopped saving them.

This has got to be bizarre, in anybody's book. Some kind of retroactive update that modifies the behavior of previous versions?

One little note: Please don't anybody respond to this thread with information about the preferences of modern users for touch-screens, and so on. I'm a grumpy old man, and I only care about the behavior of the desktop units I work with. The rest of the world can go on doing whatever it's doing now, and I feel justified in doing what I do.
As I said in my previous thread, any such comment will make other readers conclude that my question has been answered, and that will be wrong.

When the computer does an action in a certain way on Monday, and changes its behavior in the same situation on Tuesday, it's a concern to those observing it. I am convinced that there are other desktop users out there, and I think it's likely that some of the old geezers have been doing this since the old DOS days. And at least a few of them must still be tinkerers, who like to get results using the keyboard, and thus are using shortcut keys, and perhaps navigating with cursor keys the way I like to do.
When that same computer reverts on Wednesday to the behavior it displayed previously, it surely ought to be a concern to the designer, as well.
 
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I have a sort of answer to my own question. It's not satisfactory, and asks more questions
than it answers, but it's some help. At least, it's better than the deafening silence I've been
experiencing.
I learned, by accident, that when I hit Windows-M, a shortcut for Minimize All Applications, the
highlight returns to the previously used icon. The cursor keys can then be used to move to the next icon.
This is the behavior previously shown in all Windows versions I know of. It's kind of a pain to be minimizing non-existing applications all the while, but it does work.
Clearly, Windows 10 is not releasing the previous application, but keeping it in some sense, or at some level, minimized. I can't see it, but Windows in some way knows that it is not entirely finished.
Doesn't make any sense, but we should be used to that by now.
 

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