Doug's placebo has to deal with a paradox, if we kindly accept that all other evidence is being ignored.
You obviously do not understand the problem. The problem is that something in the INI entry for the desktop gets corrupted, somehow. When the system is rebooted, that entry causes the icons to be placed above, or below, where they were before. Repeated boots will always do the same (moving them further), until that entry gets changed, or deleted, somehow. The script simply removes those entries, and they get recreated on boot. Your "fix" probably just changes the entry, but takes no steps to be sure that it doesn't get changed, and used, again.
Not being able to execute any Rexx script anymore can be a good reason to shutdown the WPS (REXX.DLL entry in POPUPLOG.OS2).
I have never seen such a thing. Perhaps you should explain exactly what problem you have with REXX, and get it fixed. I have one system that runs a REXX script 24/7, and it never has a problem (other REXX scripts are also used). I usually do some updating, once per month, so it gets rebooted, once per month. My other systems run the same script, but usually get rebooted more often, for one reason, or another.
In fact, it doesn't seem to matter if the REXX doesn't get executed every time. A system crash will prevent the bad entry from being written to the INI file at shutdown. and as noted, the problem doesn't happen every time anyway.
Typically the script has no use, exceptions excluded. You may as well always execute a REM, after having solved it once, and conclude that REM stops it from happening again.
See the description of the problem, above. Before I started running the script at shutdown, I was running it manually, about every second, or third, boot, to fix the problem, on more than one computer (along with having to adjust the icon locations, which gets to be pretty boring after a few tries). After using the script at every shutdown, I have lost count of the number of months, since I last saw it. You cannot argue with success.