Windows 7 Image Thumbnails Revert

I altered some pictures using Windows Live Photo Gallery. The thumbnails in Explorer showed up fine. I used Disk Cleanup, which reset the thumbnails, but strangely to the original image (see image1 and the highlighted pic) - as you will see, the highlighted pic is colour, but the small preview shows it as it should be in the bottom left of the window, as a black and white image.

Now look at image 2 - the only change is that I viewed in Extra Large icons, instead of just large, notice how the preview has corrected itself to it's black and white state?

Image 3 shows going back to Large Icons and how it stays black and white... until you close the window and go back to it again, and it is once again as image 1.

Very annoying if you have altered the original beyond recognition and now cannot find it because the thumbnail no longer reflects changes made.

I have cleared Thumbnails again and again in disk cleanup, turned off system restore and cleared that out, uninstalled Windows Live Photo Gallery, restarted the machine, used CCleaner to do all the same things, etc etc... cannot find an answer as to where it is getting the original image from? And why it is using it? And how to stop it!!!???

Thanks for the reply Richard, but in troubleshooting I got rid of any restore points, and the changes go back some months, so there is no way that doing a system restore would be practical. Windows 7 seems to keep a cache of the "original and unaltered" images somewhere and uses those thumbnails instead of the "actual image" as it is now... if I knew where the cache was I could wipe it out, but... so far no luck.

I guess unless anyone actually knows, I shall just have to live with it until next wipe and reinstall is due, and try to make sure that I don't try to use all of Windows 7 & Live's new features again, as they seem to be a little buggy... hmm... I say this with greatest respect to Microsoft, but it seems that the issues are stemming from Windows 7's and Windows Live Photo Gallery's want to save previous states of your photos. The photos themselves are fine, but now it's got all confused about which copy of thumbnails it has collected should it use... maybe it's trying to be too clever... just give me an undo only button... not a full catalogue of every change ever made.

in users\username\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\explorer

You'll have to log in as a different user to delete the contents.

hi
great thread!i have this problem ... I've searched for it ... but i wanna something else!actually i don't want to solve this problem,i wanna use it ... i want to recover the original image from the cropped or edited image if it's possible!it seems that this can be done at least for a smaller copy of the image in the size of thumbnail!can any one help me?!
something else,i edited and cropped a pic,and i expected to see the original pic in the thumbnail but there was no difference!!!i see this problem just for images which i'd got from my friend's computer!!
and the last thing i wanna mention is that actually when i use ctrl+'mouse scroll' to make the thumbnails larger i see till a special size the thumbnails are still like original images and after that they suddenly change,again when i refresh the folder,if the sizes are not too large,the thumbnails become same as original images ... also some of them don't change even in extra large size!!!for example,one of them is edited by windows paint,and the thumbnail is same as the original image even in extra large size!!!or some of cropped images have extra large uncropped thumbnails!!!
hope someone helps me,i really need to recover the original images!
thanks for attention

Great post. Exact problem I have been having. I never realized that using extra large icons mysteriously updated the thumbnail. It seems to only happen on images that I use "fix" in Windows Live Photo Gallery. (which I DID NOT even want to download but did since they "conveniently" decided to remove the basic editing functions from photo viewer" I will report back if I can find out a solution.