Back when I first graduated from Win 3.1 to 98SE, and effectively lost the Program Manager in favor of the desktop, I quickly learned that it’s handy to treat desktop shortcuts and icons the same as browser favorites/bookmarks, collect related ones into sub-folders.

So I’ve got one for system utilities, one for internet (basically, anything I’m likely to use online), one for games, and so on. There’s a few oddball things like an antique copy of DBase I’m into a lot that don’t fit into neat categories, which stay as individual icons, but even so I only fill two columns in 800x600 mode.