While this bug is there in both the Portable and Installed versions of Infrarecorder, I think it is a big enough issue to inform the users here.
As you may know, in Windows 7, you can hide the desktop icons by right-clicking on the desktop and unchecking Show Desktop Icons.
Well, the bug is that Infrarecorder does that secretly every time you run it. It must be doing it on the registry level, because the icons don't disappear right away, but the next time you reboot, they are gone.
The workaround is easy - just re-check Show Desktop Icons - but it's really annoying. And, because the effect is delayed until you reboot, it wasn't obvious that Infrarecorder was the culprit. I'd been trying to find out the reason for my randomly disappearing icons for months!
I've e-mailed Christian (the dev) and posted on their bug-tracker, so I don't know if there's anything that has to be done here - it's not specific to the Portable version.
Although... would it be possible to build a way to backup the affected registry key using the Portable launcher, so that it reset itself when it closes?
UPDATE: I've received a response from Christian, and he said he'll look into it.
UPDATE 2: Out of curiosity, I ran Process Monitor to check what happens when IR starts up. Even after filtering to show only registry entries generated by infrarecorder.exe in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion, it still showed 2,572 entries logged by Process Monitor, including specifically setting the HideIcons key to 1.
A similar check on Audacity shows only 14 entries, OpenOffice only 13 entries, and Thunderbird only 197 entries.
I'm pretty sure he's using C++ for this. @ anyone with knowledge, is it possible for a C++ compiler to pick up HKCU keys inadvertently?