Steam’s been weird with updates lately. To fix it:

- Disable auto desktop shortcuts:
Go to Steam > Settings > Library > uncheck "Create desktop shortcut for new installs."

- Turn off achievement notifications:
Steam > Settings > Notifications > uncheck “Display a notification” under Achievements.

It probably reset stuff after a recent update. Annoying, yeah.

I never got the notification for the reply to my thread, but neither of those options are in the settings menu. I can only manually uncheck the option to create a desktop shortcut every time I install the game, which is incredibly annoying, but at least it's an option that exists. There's literally no way to turn off achievement notifications, though.

I'm really not happy that there's no way to prevent this. I *HATE* having my desktop cluttered with all these icons, to the point that it's going to make me more reluctant to buy games. Why in seven hells did they remove this option and its default-ability from the game install dialog?