Until yesterday, I was able to remove the color background (completely) from the desktop icon text when I right-clicked on the desktop, next clicked "Arrange Icons by..", and then deselected "Lock Web Items on Desktop".
For some reason this technique no longer works. This is just a nuisance, and not a serious problem, but I would appreciate it if someone could suggest how else to remove the color backgrounds. And "No", I'm not sure what I may have done to cause this change, except that I have just defragged my hard disk and am in the process of packing the files to the front of the disk.