Is your desktop a cluttered mess of shortcuts, files and folders? If you can never quite find the time to clear it up, then you might appreciate AutoHideDesktopIcons, a free tool which hides any desktop icons until you need them.

The program is portable, no installation required; just run it, click "To-Tray", and wait. Within five seconds your desktop icons will vanish. When you need them, left click the desktop and they'll return. Easy.

Clicking the program's system tray icon reveals its settings. You can set the "Timer" to whatever delay you'd like before the desktop icons disappear (3-100 seconds); there's an option to launch AutoHideDesktopIcons when your PC starts; you can have it hide your icons when it first starts, and the program can hide the taskbar, as well.

AutoHideDesktopIcons does have to run in the background to make all this happen, of course, but fortunately it's very lightweight. The program consumed only 1.3MB RAM on our test PC, and does very little work, only leaping briefly into action when you click the desktop.