Can you give an example by too long?
 
When you right click on an icon and select properties, what is the default name in the "general" tab?

Kooka Canon, Inc. CanoScan N670U/N676U/LiDE 20
 
That's the default name for my scanner shortcut. It takes up a lot of space. If I change the default name in Properties, won't that mis-direct the shortcut?

No, that shouldn't misdirect the shortcut, that's not the path, the actual path the shortcut is pointing to is probably something like /mnt/camera.

I haven't used Mandrake since last year, or since 10.0 official, but you may be able to do the following, well see if you can with Mandrake because with my distro this how I do it:
 
-Go to KDE Control Center -> Desktop -> Behavior -> Device Icons tab.
-Uncheck the devices that you don't want to show on your desktop or the ones that have the long names and are annoying, for example mounted hard disk, etc. and then hit apply (of course)
-Next, create your own devices with the exact names you want to give them by right clicking on your desktop and select create new -> Device -> Hard disk device (for example), give it any name for this device, and then click on the device tab and select the right device from the given list (this also where you can change the icon for mounted and unmounted device, both on the device tab and general tab)
 
Hope this helps a little.
 
-I think you can also change on Mandriva the name of devices through the fstab, (/etc/fstab) and of course you have to do it as root. You'll see lines such as /dev/hda1/ /mnt/partition1.
Something like that, so you would change it to /mnt/Hard drive and of course you have to create a folder named Hard drive in the /mnt folder.

OK, I'll give that a try. I did try changing the default name in Properties, but I keep getting "Access Denied," even after changing to permissions level 1.