Weird folder icons in taskbar after explorer crash.

Zoloft · 05 May 2014

I was editing some id3 tags in DBPowerAmp, and explorer crashed. Random, but, ok. It took a two or three minutes for explorer to recover, and when it did, it was like the display driver had failed, as everything was HUGE upon recovery. Ok, so, nothing a reboot won't fix, right? Humm, MOSTLY. Now, since then (and a few other reboot attempts) there have been a few anomalies. The most obvious, in my taskbar, though the
"computer" "homegroup" and "libraries" and "libraries" icons are normal, my personal favorites, and "network" favorite all display like the image.

In addition, when I click on the desktop toolbar the control panel icon is just a gray/black box, and the network icon is generic, like the task bar icons.

Any idea what might be going on, and how I can remedy this odd circumstance?

Thanks,

Russell

Damian Adelle · 05 May 2014

Have you tried a program like TuneUp Utilities or Glary Utilities to repair errors with shortcuts and such?, or using them along with CCleaner to clean files and registry?, sometimes it could be that, it happened to me. Or maybe you could try updating/reinstalling your video driver.

Zoloft · 05 May 2014

I haven't tried anything as of yet, wanted to run it thru the brilliant brains here first, to see if this might ring a bell with someone as the symptom of something larger. . . I do greatly appreciate your feedback, I do not have any registry repair apps (with the exception of CCleaner of course), so I will look into those. Reinstalling the nvidia driver would be an excellent step too, fortunately, I have a back up of my installed one handy, so that should be a piece of cake!

Damian Adelle · 05 May 2014

Zoloft said:

It took a two or three minutes for explorer to recover, and when it did, it was like the display driver had failed, as everything was HUGE upon recovery.

When that happened to me, I was usually doing a graphic draining activity like playing a game or using GIMP or Photoshop, and my ATI driver would tell me that something happened and it needed to restart. The screen would fade and for a moment, the system would switch to classic windows style. That usually meant that I had to update the driver, because the ATI Catalyst utility is not that helpful, if I want to be 100% sure that my video driver is the most recent, I have to go directly to the ATI download page and check it for myself. Perhaps yours was in some similar state, at any rate, try to replicate the incident, see if it was the program.

Gornot · 06 May 2014

Editing ID3 tags and having an explorer window open in the actual folder where the contents are being edited tends to crash explorer like that, that's for sure. The "HUGE" just means that when video drivers crashed your screen resolution changed.

Video drivers crash all the time, newest version or not; it just happens. What I'd do is definitely try and rebuild my icon cache and see if that helps to restore those icons.

Zoloft · 06 May 2014

I am glad this isn't an unusual situation! I saw the rebuild icon cache in another thread when I searched, so I've already downloaded the .bat file. I will give that a go as well. Will be a few days until I try anything, Friday, when I have all day (my weekend) so if I for some reason need to spend hours sitting here, I'll have the time.

Thanks again for your input!

Gornot · 07 May 2014

No problem, definitely give it a try and post back when possible, I always monitor (subscribe) to threads I post in

Zoloft · 09 May 2014

Simply re-installing the driver, and running ccleaner, which I do weekly anyway, seemed to have resolved the issue. I appreciate both of your feedback. Thanks much! From here on out, I will only edit id3 tags with the folder CLOSED!