No icon appears

When i open a folder in windows explorer, some of the .exe files don`t appear with the correct icon. I open the properties window and under the general tab the icon appears to be fine. I made a shortcut to the desktop and was given a change icon option in the properties window. Even then, it gave me the option to select what looked like the correct icon but when i selected it and applied it nothing happens and the default icon is still in place. I can only change it by selecting the browse option in properties and poaching an icon from another file. How can I get it to use the icon that it says it already has? Thanks, Stoo.

Thanks but I guess I didn`t explain myself well enough. The program was on the desktop but it was a shortcut to a program. The program itself had the correct icon but even when i deleted the shortcut and then added it again it still wasn`t the right one. i tried changing the icon in the properties window but even that didn`t work.

Try changing the size of the icons. Hold the CNTRL key while moving the mouse wheel.

I went to the Rebuild Icon Cache location but it says that it`s nor for a single shortcut
icon which is the problem. I did delete it and create a new shortcut but even though the prog file icon seemed fine the new shortcut still wasnt right. Eventually I pinched the icon off the progs uninstall.exe file cause it was the same ( BTW the prog was VLC - the avi/mp4 viewer). This works but it still doesnt help with the orig problem which probably will present again. Thanks for the help so far tho. Everyone on this forum has been really helpful. Its great not to be alone in the wilds any more .

Check this out: Desktop icons / display windows 7. Looks like it has some proposed fixes for an issue similar to yours.

Let us know if this helps to solve the problem!
Cassandra
Microsoft Windows Outreach

stoo said:

As before, when attempting to run the icon cache rebuild it says that
this is NOT the way to fix a single faulty icon. The icon belongs to a 3rd party .exe file that diplays fine in its own folder. The prob occurs when I create a shortcut on the desktop. It offers me what I think is an icon from the microsoft desktop set instead even when I go into the file properties and change icon there. Hopefully someone can offer me the relevant solution this time. Thanks, Stoo.

Stoo ... A little trick I've used for that with XP and now Win7 is to change the icon to something else... anything else... then set it back to the program's own icon. It should then stay correct.

The problem is that the program doesn't have a Win7 type icon in it and the shortcut does not recognize it. The shortcut keeps a pointer to the icon as <file path>;<icon number> ... when the icon can't be extracted from the program, file path reverts to NULL and windows displays a default Icon from the Shell...

The solution is to get the file path set correctly... so pick something else save your changes, then pick the one you want and save your changes again.