as stated above, when i played heroes of might and magic three, it rearranges all of the desktop icons on my desktop, is there some way of stopping this from happening?

Did it crash when it did this? I notice this happens with games that have a set resolution below your desktop resolution. If it crashes your desktop gets the games resolution for a second and if you have quite a few icons it moves them about.

The only solution I know about is to run the game in a window.
(Just set your color depth in Windows to 16-bit and press F4)

no, it didn't crash and it would be nice to find a solution without changing window settings

I've seen some games that set the display to their convenience when starting and set it back when closing, with icons being displaced if they were out of the desktop in between, even without crash involved.
I'm not sure there is a solution because I think this behavior comes from Windows... try to launch Heroes III in windowed mode, but you'll to set screen colors to 16bit, hence another 'problem'.

This is a long shot but you could check to see if heroes somehow turned auto arrange desktop icons on. Just rightclick your desktop and mouse over arrange icons by, then see if the Auto Arrange is ticked if so untick it.

Windows typically feels free to rearrange your icons and doesn't keep any record of the layout. However, if you download layout.dll from this site and copy it to your system32 directory, you should be able to install it and then right click on My Computer to save and restore a preferred layout.