Damn… make it “a respectable amount IMHO.”
[sub]Goes off into a corner to play a consoling game of Snood[/sub]
Mac OS9.1
9 icons, which are:
6 different partitions of my hard drive
2 desktop printers
Trash (currently occupied)
I also have three folders tabbed at the bottom of the screen. This is a great feature of OS8-9. You drag a folder to the bottom of the screen, and it sort of drops off the bottom, and only a little tab with the name is visible, like a manila folder in a filing cabinet. Then, when you click on the tab, or drag something over it, the original folder pops up.
Those three folders all contain shortcuts to various oft-used areas, one is Applications (click on one starts the application), one Utilities (again, a click starts that utility), and one that holds folders which contain various file sets (music, movies, job files, etc.). It’s a great system, and keeps my desktop clean, so I can see the beeeeoootiful pictures I put on it.
MacOS 9.2, four icons:
“Blue Boy” - hard drive
A shortcut to my wife’s typing tutor program
“Scratch” - a catch-all for stuff in progress
“Trash” -Disposables 
And one tabbed folder at the bottom of the screen, for me to drag files to commonly-used programs.
Gateway EV700 with Win XP.
Seventeen:
–Recycle bin
–Pinball
–AOL
–Play Jeopardy!
–cd copier
–Easy CD Creator
–Microsoft money
–spider solitaire
–MusicMatch
–My Computer
–Microsoft Word
–Microsoft Outlook
–Microsoft Works
–Tour Win XP
–Adobe PhotoDeluxe
–Norton personal firewall
–Norton cleansweep
And it just occurred to me that I don’t even use half of these shortcuts.
i use my desktop as my workspace. I save all files to the desktop and anything im currently working on is on the desktop or at least as a shortcut on the desktop - so right now about 40 icons.