This one’s by request. A commenter who goes by the handle justforfun wants to know is there’s a way to create “a windows lock icon (something that replicates what the ‘show desktop’ icon does for win+D, except for win+L.”
Yes, indeed. I’ve written about the Lock keyboard shortcut before, but this option is useful if you’re mouse-centric or if your keyboard doesn’t have a Windows log key.
Create a new shortcut using the following command:
rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation
Note that there’s a space after the initial executable and no space after the comma.
Give the shortcut a descriptive name and place it on the desktop or the Start menu. You’re now able to lock your computer with a single click.
Ed Bott 
This is one of the best tips i’ve ever seen. Thanks Ed.
Ed, you’re a king, and based on kishan’s comment, at least one other person besides me will find this useful. Hope you didn’t take offense to my last comment on the tip/question-request-post – it was purely inquisitive. I wasn’t sure if your “tip posts” are designed to draw answers from the audience or from yourself. Now I know – thanks for your help! 🙂
FYI, scrolling through your archives is very interesting!
One follow-up you could tack onto this post is a quick way to change the shortcut’s icon to something appropriate:
1)Right-click on the shortcut icon, select ‘properties’ from the context menu
2)Within the ‘properties’ select the ‘shortcut’ tab, click the ‘change icon…’ button
3)In the browse entry box, paste “%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll” (without the quotes – note, this is the default spot for Windows XP icons, different OS may require some hunting) and hit ‘browse’
4)Select your icon of choice (there is a really nice gold padlock which looks cool and just makes sense) and hit ‘ok’ as many times as needed to get out of the menus.
P.S. If you are able to find any tools that perform those other requests I spoke about (preview tabs, etc., etc.) I’d love to hear about it. Apparently one of the commenters found something similar, so I’m going to go follow up on that.