Windows 7: Overlay Icons on Thumbnails

try unchecking the display icons on thumbnails and apply etc then recheck the display icons box and see it resetting it helps.

Thanks mate. Yeah I thought of that too and have tried it a couple times but it doesn't work. The only thing that refreshes them correctly is either log out and back in, reboot or go into the default programs and re-select the default program even if it already selected. And it's very intermittent too, didn't happen at all last night so thought all was good but then this morning the word docs after going into add-remove programs changed the display icon on the thumbnail again. I reselected word as the default program for docs and they refreshed correctly again. Running out of ideas. I do appreciate all the suggestions guys.

Cheers
Wayne

Did you try uninstalling Google Earth?

Yeah sorry, I should of mentioned that too. I did try that also but it made no difference. I didn't think it would as the random icon displayed on the thumbnail can suddenly appear as anything. It just happened to be doing the google earth one at the time. But it's been all sorts of things, same icon across all doc thumbnails just not the correct word icon.

Just finding it very strange. My Windows 7 is fully upto date. I presume you guys don't see the same anomaly? Other than this cosmetic issue the laptop is sound, working well.

Cheers
Wayne

Yes it is very strange and I'm out of ideas. I have a fair number of videos and they all have the same overlay icon. In my case that's VLC.

Ok cheers for all your help. I'm baffled too. I did have to do a restored image some months ago, maybe some kind of corruption got in although I don't remember the image I took having this problem. I made sure the laptop was firing on all cylinders when I took that image. Doubtful but I do have a SSD cache drive whick works in tandem with the hard drive swapping hot and cold data in and out. Maybe that has some effect but I have had it over 6 months so I don't think it's this, plus it's such a strange thing to bug out on. Maybe just try and live with it, perhaps even turn the display icon on thumbnail off despite the fact that I like seeing what program will launch.

Well I found after some searching that some random icon changes can be down the low default 'Max Cached Icons' on windows 7. So later I will try and create or modify the registry key to overide its default value of 500 to 4096. I will keep you posted on whether it helps or not. Maybe others will see my post and have similar issues and happen upon a fix. I am optimistic that this will help and it kind of makes sense. I have about over 600 gigs worth of used data on my laptop so there are an awful lot of icons in there. Kicking off something like the add/remove programs list does show many icons as I have so, so many programs and games installed. So perhaps this is pushing the icon cache over the limit. I am not really sure of the technicalities of how it all works but seems like it could help.

I guess alot of people don't have the problem because they probably don't have loads of programs installed, aren't as fussy as me checking everything & many probably don't have the icon set to display on the thumbnails. I found one other person describing my exact problem (esa1234) in the below linked thread but it seemed to fade long ago. Nonethless I have messaged them to see if they ever fixed it. But at least I am not alone!

Icon Association Misbehaving!

Sorry to keep adding to the thread. Just want to keep everyone abreast and in case others get same issue. So far adding the string entry to increased the max icon cache seems to working after couple days. Will be keeping a very close eye on it and I will report back. I reckon if in a weeks time the icon covers are holding can be confident this was the solution.

Thanks Scottyboy. Keep us posted.

well done on sourcing a fix,
i too use the icon overlay, its real handy to see what each filetype opens with at a glance.
will keep that in mind i have a hell of a lot of icons /thumbs on my desktop pc,inluding externals is a total of 3760GB of storage, mostly full