Windows 7 - Icon Cache - Rebuild

Ya, I had put the band-aid on it yesterday with direct shortcuts and pinned them but I'm one to keep attacking the problem until it is really fixed. I could re-install those programs but there are way too many, better to just re-image in that case. It has to be something with the windows reg itself because it affected so many icons all at once.

More Clues: The icons were showing the old XP default icon before doing the disk cleanup. Now they show a combination of the blank page icon and the newer Windows 7 default icon with the green in it.

My guess is that it may have been some issue with iTunes that may have caused it. The best fix is to create new shortcuts directly from the exe files IMO.

Another weird thing I just found. After all the work I did today it started to show the icon correctly but only after unpinning from taskbar. If I open outlook or winword the icon is default. But then if I pin it and then unpin it the icon is fixed on the taskbar but not in the jump menu.....
Do you know if icons are pulled from 2 different locations?

It all depends on the source target that was used to create the shortcut from.

You could reset and clear the jump lists to see if the icon is fixed after it rebuilds itself as you open items.

Well the plot thickens. It is somehow related to that bad install of iTunes or maybe some other installer. I cannot uninstall MS Office. It ran though the uninstaller but it never really uninstalled it. I am currently trying to remove it with a special MS uninstaller for this issue. Then I'm gonna try to re-install to see the outcome. I realize that small things that should save down to profile when shutting down, doesn't. Position of icons that I arranged in the extra toolbars I added to the taskbar. I think I might just re-image tomorrow morn..... BLAH!!!

I had over 40 icons on my desktop forever. Just the other day I decided to put them all in a folder called programs and leave that on my desktop. Today 75% of the images went to windows default. I tried first the "Rebuild_Icon_Cache.bat" from the first page and right now everything is back to normal. Thank goodness for the forums.

That's great news Analog. Since you leave a bunch of shortcuts on your desktop that may not always be used often, then you might also consider to disable the System Maintenance Troubleshooterto prevent them from being removed automatically if not used in 3 months.

Good tip thanx for that!

You're most welcome.

Another potential fix for this type of issue: I was having similar problems to those listed above - I could see the labels of files and folders on my desktop but none of them had icons of any sort (including no generic icons - all of them were completely empty), as well I could not open the start menu by clicking or using any of the keyboard shortcuts. The IconCache.db rebuild would not work, I could delete the file but it would not re-create itself after multiple restarts, changing colors, resolution, check show all desktop items, etc.

The solution that finally worked for me was opening the registry value HKEY_Local_Machine/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Shell Icons and deleting the entry labled "29". This immediately* restored my icons and gave me back access to the Start Menu.

*Note: I found this resolution in a Google Search that also said IconCache.db needed to be deleted and that you needed to clear the Thumbnail cache through Disk Cleanup, then restart. I had already done those steps in previous troubleshooting methods.