Man I used to HATE having to rearrange everything after that happened. Then I found out if you power off without shutting down (not that adviseable), the old layout is restored :-)
I'm using a PC Magazine freebie program called 'WinTidy' now -- it can save/restore icon layouts, and even has the option to stay resident in your system tray and immediately fix it should your icons get jumbled up. It can even save a custom layout for different resolutions should you feel inclined to do so.
I don't run it memory resident, but have it bound to a keyboard shortcut and set to auto-restore my layout on launch... So if my desktop somehow all gets messed up again, all I need to do is hit CTRL-ALT-F12 and all icons automagically jump back to where they belong.