Icon Cache - Rebuild

I downloaded from one of the links in your tutorial and it seems to have "infected" ( is that the right word? I dunno? I'm relatively new to 'computing') Bandzip, which I'd intended to use to open the file. Is this making any sense? Obviously I was trying to fix my desktop icons suddenly disappearing on me, now I get a nasty feeling I've picked up another "bug?", "gremlin?", you know what I mean, don't you?
I'd appreciate some advice on this, like I said, I'm seriously bereft of computer skills/knowledge and it feels like I'm sliding deeper into a hole with each step I take trying to re3medy the situation. I look forward to hearing from someone who knows his onions, cheers.

Hi Brink, I wasn't surprised to hear that I got it horribly wrong and despite there only being 1 download I managed to download 2 files, neither of which were the one you mention. Default_ICO.reg and all_default_file_extensions.zip were the 2 I somehow decided were the way forward, and this all came about after taking Option 2 to manually rebuild the Icon cache which proved unsuccessful. I then tried to follow step 5, but unfortunately I found it to be a bit vague, the ICO option ( where would that be?) and the merge (with what?) were what got me lost, but this is by no means unusual for me when I try to follow tutorials. This is obviously my problem, and certainly not a reflection on the quality of the tutorials and the multitude of satisfied users who post their thank yous prove this beyond doubt. There is an assumed knowledge with these things and sometimes I don't have it, but no-one ever said it was going to be easy!! As for Bandzip, I'm not 100% sure that the zip file I downloaded here is what's giving me all this weird Language file stuff, so as I often have to do I'm going to put it down to experience and trust that I'll learn from it, and hopefully if it doesn't kill me it will make me stronger. My icons are still all over the place so I plan to just start again, and downloading the .bat file might go someway to a more favourable outcome. I don't want to take too much of you guys' time so I'll crack on with that and see what happens. As always I greatly appreciate your input and I do intend to keep my contact to an absolute minimum, working stuff out myself is how I'll learn - that's the theory, anyway....

I found that Adobe Reader was the cause of the icon problem and after applying the cache cleanup ALL icons launched Adobe Reader even though the links were pointing to the correct applications. I uninstalled Reader and the icons immediately were restored.

thanks to all for help

Hello,

I tried the manual steps and the missing icon is fixed. However, now the systems takes over 5min to show the logon screen after the Windows Welcome screen. Please advise on how to resolve this issue. Thanks.

thanks for guide :)

I chose manual bat command method but change the last line as u only need to restart explorer.exe to start a new cache file

"start explorer.exe"

on my desktop I have 2 icons "greyed out" desktop.ini can I safely delete there icons