Windows 7: Desktop icon thumbnails continuously rearranging

Hi, I went on my computer today (it was already on, I just moved my mouse to get it out of 'sleep' mode), and the thumbnails on the icons on my desktop were rearranging themselves automatically every few seconds. For instance, video files would have the Firefox logo, TXT documents would have the WinRAR logo, RAR files would have the Avira logo, etc., and then in a few seconds it'd switch up all over again. Also my desktop background was alternating between the image I normally have as a wallpaper, and a blank black background. I started the task manager, and my computer was freezing up, and explorer.exe was taking up 50% CPU. Eventually I was able to end the process, start it up again, and return back to normal.



Has anyone ever experienced this type of glitch before? I looked on google and I didn't find anything. I really want to find out if this type of glitch has ever been reported before, because I am worried that it could be a symptom of a virus.


Thank you in advance to anyone who can help.

First , follow the tutorial Icon Cache - Rebuild , and have a disk cleanup .

If still the situation is the same , post the topic here in System Security - Windows 7 Forums . It may be a malware issue .

But this link seems to be on fixing icons that aren't displaying correctly. I appreciate your response, but I don't see how the tutorial will help since, as mentioned in my post, I was able to get rid of the glitch.

What I need to know is, has this phenomenon I described in my post ever been reported by others? And if so, are there any viruses of which it is symptom?

Once I got all my dat file icons changed to IE ... that was due to a corrupted video download addon

I asked others if they have some better solution for this problem . Shortly they will reply

It could be one of the following things:

1) Malware. So you need to scan regualarly with the resident AV and an on-demand scanner like MBAM.

2) A custom theme. That could be messing up the desktop icons.

3) A corrupted video driver. In that case, the driver should be updated/swapped.

4) A malfunctioning gfx card. Run diags on the card.

It may help to run a sfc scan, that'll fix any system file corruption.

Thank you.

Thanks. I scanned my computer with MBAM, SuperAntiSpyware, AVG rescue CD, Bitdefender rescue CD, and Avira rescue CD.
Nothing found so far.
As far as custom themes, I don't know if my theme is really 'custom', since the only customization I can think of that has been made is that I have a wallpaper that is a picture I found online.
I will look video driver updates and try to run diagnostics on my graphics card.
I'm not sure about running the sfc scan though, just in case it might revert any changes I/my programs may have made to system files...I don't really know anything about this type of scan and after reading the warning on the page about it on this site, I'm a little weary about it, so I'd rather not.

I have some more information to give about the incident that occurred.
At the time that it this bug started, I was configuring the 'brightness' on my monitor. I did not originally relate this to the bug because;
1. I started pressing the buttons on my monitor right the display resumed from 'standby', so I'm not sure if the bug started before I started pressing the buttons or not.
2. I press those buttons regularly (I usually keep the brightness as low as it gets, but I turn it up when I watch videos) and this has never occurred before.
3. I was (and still am, to some degree) under the assumption that the monitor acts as a slave to the computer and can't change anything on the computer. It's not a USB monitor or whatever.
4. I recently downloaded a WMV file that seemed to have a virus in it.

But since you mentioned stuff about my graphics card and video driver and whatnot, I though maybe the fact that I was changing my brightness level right when the display turned on may have had something to do with this.
Do you think so?

Thank you both very much for your time.

Oh yeah, and if anyone knows of any reports of the same exact type of incident that happened with me, please let me know.