Windows 10: How to shrink the bounding box of desktop icons?

I just reimaged my office computer from Win 7 to Win 10. Most things are fine but one thing annoys me greatly:

The desktop icons are embedded in an insanely wide bounding box. I.e. if I select a desktop icon it gets surrounded by a light-bluish transparent box that is at least three times as wide as the icon.
It is thus impossible to place an icon close to the screen border, because if its "bounding box" overlaps the border, Windows will automatically place the icon elsewhere (another one of those unwanted behaviors, but that's a different story).
Due to this huge box I also have to place my desktop very widely interspaced (i.e. at least the equivalent of two icons' width apart) or else I get a hard time hitting the right one, because clicking on it then frequently triggers the overlapping left or right icon. :-(

On my home system that bounding box is barely wider than the displayed icon, maybe 20% of the icons's width on each side and I am thus used to place my icons in groups and also much closer to each other.

Any ideas how one can shrink or do away with that surrounding box?

Just in case: of course I have already switched to small icons and disabled automatic placement and grid alignment. :-(
I also fiddled with the registry settings at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, specifically with IconSpacing as suggested in misc. google hits that I found but changing that value does not seem to have any influence whatsoever (I tried values between -20 and -2000, the original value being -1115).

:)

 

Windows 10 bug report - Bounding box rectangles create make random pixels appear

Hello Guru Kiran,

After following your steps the problem seems to go away. However, this morning the problem has returned. It is a bug in Windows 10.

I have installed the Windows 10 driver for GeForce 9500 GT card for 64-bit Windows 10, and have SFC at 100% with no integrity problems.

When I draw a bound box in my desktop background and move it around, there appears discolored pixels, as if the bounding rectangle is not being completely erased. These pixels do not go away until the background is refreshed.

 

Windows 10 bug report - Bounding box rectangles create make random pixels appear

In Windows 10, when I draw a bounding box on my desktop (drag the mouse while holding the button down), when I release the mouse, the stretching rectangle bounding box does not erase correctly. Some of the pixels in my desktop background remain the color
of the bounding box rectangle, and some of the pixels on the background magically change color.

This messes up the desktop and requires me to refresh the background before proceeding to restore the background correctly.

This is a bug in Windows 10.

I wondered if anyone else has noticed this problem.