>>Suppose someone, instead of creating a shortcut, drags an actual file to a desktop icon. Is there any way to find out where the file's home directory was, in order to put it back? It seems to get completely lost...
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>I would think of it as just moving a file from one directory to another. As far as I know, once the file has been moved, there isn't a way to determine where it was moved from.

Yes, it's now in Desktop, from wherever it came, with no history, evidently. Seems like a good Wishlist item for future Windows, to retain a path to wherever anything on the Desktop came from. This isn't the first time I've seen this problem...