It was bad enough that it insisted over the summer on having a shortcut called "Work - Edge" instead of just "Edge", but yesterday it gave me that whole shadowing thing with the icon labels.
I've seen this before. To get rid of it, you have to dive into a few menus and turn off "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop" then reboot your PC. If that doesn't work, you need to edit the registry (Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ListviewShadow, if you want to try it).
Neither of these work this time.
I'm not the only person who wants a desktop they can read. This effect is widespread. Microsoft has been having issues with icon drop shadows for years and never seems to get a handle on it. I'm just glad they don't do it for file windows and the like, that would be awful.
There are some workarounds that involve changing the contrast, but they affect the font colour too. I don't want the contrast changed, anyway — I just want those drop shadows to go so I can read the text more easily!
With luck, someone at Microsoft will also have a desktop that's been messed up this way and will press for a change. On the company's past record, I can't see that a wall of raging complaints in their forums will have any impact.