I was going to post a query here asking why sorting of the Desktop lister by name kept giving me illogical results, but then I stumbled on the answer, which might be useful to someone else. It turned out that some of the items shown in the Desktop lister were in Users\myname\desktop, and others were in Users\public\desktop. They both showed up in the lister, but they got sorted separately. This is presumably more feature than bug, and easy to fix once you figure out you need to have all the shortcuts in the same desktop folder if you want them sorted together.
Feature or bug, it's something Explorer does that's probably outside of Opus's control.
(Explorer shows the virtual Desktop folder within Opus. If you want to see the same files as a real folder, using Opus's native mode, go to /desktopdir instead.)