Try this?

ok misarable stardock company let me explain the situation clearly,this problem reported many years but u still did not fix the problem when we talk about disable auto arrange we talk about freedom to put icons where we want but even we disable auto arrange option still we cant  put icons like we do in windows ,try that when u took that icon to there the rest of icons starts to move by themselves and they auto arranging nothing can stop this there is no option for this al this time ppl complaining about this we can not have control icons whatever we do they start to move when we had a crowded desktop and when we move 1 icon our all design gets f.cked up cuz of this

Reply #1, January 2011.

The 'corralling' of icons within a fence and their subsequent need to relocate as and when fence boundaries are moved means there is always going to be a 'shuffle' of icons to re-fit into the new fence shape/size.

The closest you will get to absolute positioning is to maintain a standard and static GUI, both in function and resolution.

If icons maintain an absolute position relative to the desktop resolution they will become hidden when one of two things happens.

1. resizing your desktop resolution,

or

2. resizing of Fences - hence it is not an appropriate option.

You can arrange the icons in your Fence. They will however align to a grid inside the Fence.

I see I'm not alone in my frustration.

A victim of simply buying Fences outright, based on someone's recommendation, instead of trying the 30-day trial first, so I'm at least glad it was only $10.

The reason I bought Fences is because I RDP to my computer a lot and I hate my desktop icons always rearranging. I was told by someone that Fences stops that from happening.

I haven't even tested that functionality yet because I stumbled across this forum while researching on my frustration about the forced icon arrangment and was hoping there was a fix.

Like everyone else in this thread complaining, this is absolutely ludicrous. I can create a fence but I can't arrange my own icons inside the fence however I want? That's like buying a house but the Realtor gets to dictate how I arrange my furniture.

I want to arrange my icons in an order of MY choosing so you guys really ought to consider changing this behavior of the app. It appears this is almost universally hated by everyone who tries the app.

Has there been any updates to this issue?

WOW! I just signed in to post in a 6 year old thread!

Just to let you guys know that I had a fun 5 minutes with Fences (version 3.0.3 in case someone wonders), then 10 minutes trying to disable that pesky auto-arrange, then another 10 googling for a solution, 10 more signing in on what could be a better process, only to reiterate what others have said: on my computer, Fences will not live 1 hour... It SEEMS a nice idea, but NOT the way I use icons in my desktop. I like to have MY own order over my stuff, and was looking at fences only to have some "visual" separation between my groups of icons, which *I* arrange the way *I* want. I'm tired of computer software that *THINKS* it knows better! I *SO* much hate that!

Just so you understand HOW I like to arrange icons, I often have a group of related documents, I'll use generic names to exemplify. Say I have "Course A", then "Course B", then "Course C" which are in the same group. I then will place "Questions A" *UNDER* "Course A", and likewise for the others *IF* I have them! If I always had all types of files for all options, I guess that I would not need to be able to sort stuff on my own, but in reallity, oftentimes I have some files for some of the options and not others, but I like to group them visually, as in, *UNDER* the related "master" files...

So, since you guys haven't found a way for this in 6 years, I guess it will be useless to keep my trial for longer than these few minutes. You should REALLY think about what USERS want, not just about what YOU THINK they want. I guess that, for each user that bothered creating a login and posting in this or other similar threads, 10s more will not have bothered and will simply have thrown your product away with no feedback. Hope you guys see the light, and if you do, please e-mail me and I'll give it another try, unless I've found something else that I can use in the meantime.

Nice product, but it's not good enough to keep. Uninstalling now and going to look for a working alternative.

Bye.

Yep, I have auto arrange off, ect. I sent a ticket and the response was "It's a known issue and is being looked into and will be fixed in the next update".

My issue:

If I click on an icon in a fence to open a program or a folder, then later, create a new folder or download file to the desktop and re-name it; when I hit enter the files and folders that I clicked on inside the fences will jump out of the fence onto the desktop and be named whatever the new file/folder was named.

Inside fence = file named "new", file named "old", folder named "customer". I have clicked on these 3 icons for whatever reason through the day. Later, I create or download a file called prices.xlsx and rename it to pricesA.xlsx, hit enter, the 3 icons/files or folder ("new" "old" "customer") I clicked earlier, jump out of the fence onto the desktop and are renamed to "new" is now pricesA(1) "old" is now pricesA(2) and "customer" is now pricesA(3). I have to re-name each file/folder and move it back inside the fence.

This can be re-created at will.

 Fences 3.0.3

Summary
Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00GHz 82 °F
Skylake 14nm Technology
RAM
32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1066MHz (15-15-15-36)
Motherboard
MSI Z170A GAMING M5 (MS-7977) (U3E1) 96 °F
Graphics
LG 32 FHD (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (EVGA) 85 °F
Storage
476GB SanDisk SD8SB8U512G1122 (SSD) 88 °F
1863GB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164 (SATA) 96 °F

Seriously the only reason i got this free trial was to arrange Icons on my desktop how i want them to be.  This is just basically grouping with auto arrange.  I sometimes have busy backgrounds and i liked the idea of having my icon groups with the background blurred behind them but this Auto-Arrange BS is untenable.  This is a well made program but why run a 2-mile marathon and then give up 5 feet from the finish line.