I had some Windows XP icon weirdness going on today. About a week ago all my icons went blank. That happens once in a while, and I know that I need to reboot to fix it, so I was just waiting for a convenient time to reboot.
Today I finally did that. But after the reboot I only had a few icons looking right. The rest were all the Windows default icon that it uses for files that it doesn’t have a special icon for. Most applications, folders, the recycle bin, My Computer, etc were all that default icon.
I tried a few different things and couldn’t fix it, so I took to Google to see what it said.
The first page I found that sounded helpful said that you needed to repair the shell icon cache, which you did by erasing the ShellIconCache file in your Windows directory and rebooting, which forces Windows to rebuild the icon cache from scratch.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a ShellIconCache file anywhere on my system. Not where that article said it would be, and not anywhere else. It was supposed to be set as hidden, but no luck finding any hidden file by that name.
The Solution
The solution that worked for me was much simpler:
Right-click on the desktop and go to Properties. Click on the Appearance tab. Click on Effects. Select “Use large icons”, click OK to get out of Effects, and click OK to get out of the desktop properties. After doing that, all my icons were back and gigantic. Going back in to Desktop effects and unchecking that box brought them all back to their normal icons at normal size. My desktop was completely re-arranged because of the larger icons, which is a little annoying, but better than not having any icons at all.
Hope that helps other people if you’re having the same problem. That’s why I write these things. Let me know if it worked for you, or if you have some other surefire way of getting icons back when XP decides you don’t need them.
Worked like a charm, thanks mate.
My only question is, what causes this? I was afraid I had gotten some form of malware/virus or what not. Btw, thanks for the tip!
Thanks a million! This worked out for me too.
Thanks, that fixed it right up. Fixed all my icons even throughout start menu and recursively to all folders. I was nearing insanity and complete abandonment of Windows. Since I only really use it to play games now.
Thanks anyway, if I ever get an IT portion up on my website I’ll make sure to link to this.
Man that was genious! thnks a bunch. Another question… when my icons had all vanished, the shut down and log off/switch user options from the start menu didn’t want to work…. could those two be related?
OMG Thank you soooo much. That was driving me nuts for ages. Cheers dude
Thanks!!! Sure glad there are good people in this world who are willing to share life’s little gems. I can now sleep at night
Worked beautifully!!! Searched for half an hour to no avail for something so simple, thanks a mill…
Thanks for the great advice. Windows problems always seem to be easily fixed this way but it is almost never documented. If it were not for you I might have never gotten this fixed.
worked for me! and this was the first google result for “broken windows icons.” well done!
great! thanks… very clever.. sometimes we need to use some smart solution instead of digging up in the registry lol. but… it did not repair some icons… only a few. Excel, Messenger, and others like my nokia suite did not get fixed.. i deleted the iconcache database in documents and settings but did not get recreated..