IE Icons on Desktop Blank

I haven't seen this issue discussed before, so thought I would post it for reference. I bought a new Dell Inspiron desktop with Win 7, 64-bit home premium for my father-in-law in November. I worked through the basic setup, but did not get to update drivers at that time (he lives 400 miles to the north). I did drop 6 IE page shortcuts to to his desktop, per his request. Those icons were blank an hour later, but the links still worked. I reset them to the standard IE image, but they did not hold. I could refresh the IE icons by changing screen resolution, but they still became blank again after normal use. None of the other desktop or Taskbar icons blanked out during this period.

When I revisited my in-laws in December, I started updating drivers. The screen resolution was initially set at 1600x1200, which is native for the Dell 2007FP monitor. Since my father-in-law has vision problems, we had originally set text and icon size to 168% - large enough for him to see text, but small enough to not require horizontal scrolling to view IE and Word pages. After I updated the Intel video driver, we were able to get really good results by changing screen resolution to 1024x768, and then dropping the text and icon size to 125% of normal. As soon as the 125% setting was applied, the IE icons were restored, and are still holding a week later. I don't think the graphics driver update fixed this problem, because the other icons were never affected. My guess is that Windows 7 does not like custom text and icon sizes set higher than 150% of normal.

Thanks, James. We'll need to use the magnifier in another couple of years, but he's happy with the current look for now.

You're right. I guess it's residual logginess from too many Christmas treats. I'll remind my f-i-l of that option. Thanks for your help.