How about just doing it the easy way?
Right Click a blank part of the start menu bar and make sure the option to "lock" the task bar is unchecked.
Then right click on the task bar again and this time go to Toolbars and then click desktop. This puts a little desktop "toolbar" on your task bar:
Then just click and hold the little dots on the left side of it and drag it up onto your desktop and drop it. This creates a separate toolbar of everything on your desktop, on your desktop:
Then you can drag it over to the right side of the screen and it will dock its self to the whole left side of the screen:
From here you can change the size of the icons, auto-hide the toolbar, move the icons around, or whatever. But I would suggest also disabling the icons on your real desktop to make it a little cleaner. Just right click desktop -> Arrange Icons By -> clear check by "show desktop icons".
