Microsoft → Can I Find My Desktop on Old Hard Drive and OS?

I overlooked the 'older OS' part of the description. So here's a (probably half-assed) theory about what might be happening.

Note that Explorer does not claim to display what's in the file system. Radical example: the recycle bin looks like it contains files with the names they originally had, but it doesn't. Lesser example: some files are displayed with so-called 'localized' names (this is a hack for internationalization: user sees name in his local language, but file system has the same name for all languages, so install programs tend to work).

'Desktop' is a directory with an Explorer-localized name. The control for this is in the file desktop.ini (it's mere coincidence that the directory we are talking about, Desktop, has the name name as desktop.ini; the file is always desktop.ini even in other directories).

Here's a Win7 Desktop\desktop.ini:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21769
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-183
[LocalizedFileNames]
Snipping Tool (2).lnk=@%SystemRoot%\system32\SnippingTool.exe,-15051
 

Note that the replacement string is given not literally but as an ordinal in a DLL.

Guesswork:The ordinal numbers changed between XP and Win7. So whereas -21769 is 'Desktop' in Win7, it's 'whatever' in XP.

You could validate this by looking at a Desktop\desktop.ini on the XP system; if my guess is correct, it has a different ordinal number for its own Desktop.