Shortcut Arrow - Change, Remove, or Restore

OK, perhaps this is because I didn't 'undo' Option 3 before. I've now done that, and removed Blank.ico. I've also uninstalled VSM, which perhaps I also should have done before, and have re-applied Option 2, which, after a reboot, seems to have worked. All that remains to be seen is whether it will 'stick' this time.

Brink said:

I can understand that. Do you have a restore point dated before you had these issues available?

VSM was one of the first things I installed, which was when I first installed the OS, so System Restore may not go back that far, but I did take a registry backup the other night, before I started fiddling with this. But that would have included whatever VSM did.

Well, Option 2 has survived a second reboot, so hopefully, the fix will stick this time.

Thanks again for your support. :)

That's what I thought this morning!

After a whole day of being fine, I started my PC again this evening, and the black boxes have returned to the Desktop icons!! I really don't understand what could be happening, but I've observed two things:

1. I observed last night that when I Rebuild_Icon_Cache (with the Reg thing), the icons revert to being as they should, without the arrows. Before I used Option 2, the arrows came back after an icon cache flush, so obviously something there is working right.

2. This evening, I didn't flush the icon cache, but reverted to the 'normal' text size in Personalize > Display. After the forced log out / in cycle, the icons appeared as they should. I then reverted to my custom 110% display, and the icons stuck as they should (no black boxes). Something weird there?

So, it does appear to be something to do with using a custom text size, even though the icons are the same size using the custom and default text sizes. Having said that, using the default (100%) text size produced a space, vertically, for one more icon in a column on my Desktop, but I assume that's because of the reduced text size, and possibly different icon spacing?

What I've done now is, left the text size in Personalize > Display at the default 100%, and adjusted some of the font sizes in the advanced settings, so I'll see how that goes.

One quick question, slightly off topic - how can I make the system tray display just the time, and not the time with the date underneath? Increasing the text size in Personalize > Display achieves this, but I can't find any adjustment for the system tray font anywhere else.

Well, that hasn't worked either. It seems to hold until I completely shutdown the machine, then on restarting, the black boxes appear again.