In Windows, all of the icons on the desktop have text under them. While this is useful for many icons, for others the icon image is so distinctive that the text is unneeded, and it just clutters up the desktop. While Windows does not support the concept of a desktop icon without a label, there is a trick that allows you to do this.

- Right-click on the icon and select the Rename option.
- Delete the icon text.
- Hold down the Alt key, and type the number 255 on the number pad. Don't ask me why, but this only works if you type the numbers on the number pad.
- Hit Enter.

Ta-da, the text is gone.

What's happening is that the text isn't really gone, it's just that Alt+255 corresponds to a non-printing character.

If you want to do this on multiple icons, there is an issue in that Windows requires all icons to have unique names. You can get around this by using the Alt+255 character multiple times so that each icon has a unique number of this characters in the name.