We got a call from a customer who’s machine was having issues. We were able to force a restart on the machine, but when the machine came back up all their desktop files and icons were not there. I went to restore a few of them when I got the warning that the shortcut I was adding was already there. Never seen this before.

A quick search lead me to this page:

https://appuals.com/desktop-icons-are-missing-in-windows-10/

This solved the issue. We just had to check “Show desktop icons” and everything came back.

Let us know if this helps you.