We needed to remove the Outlook shortcut from the desktop at my current client because they use Lotus Notes. Unfortunately the Outlook shortcut isn't a normal icon, it is a “namespace link” stored in the registry. Deleting the registry entry is easy enough but we ran into problems because the registry key kept coming back every time a new user logged onto a system.

This article details the process we used to try to keep that dang shortcut off of the desktop.