Broken icon

Does anyone know how to get rid of the first MS Word icon? I have a bunch of broken icons like that whenever auto run is initiated. I know it's not a big deal, but it really bugs me because there's so many of them!

Thanks

 

Right click on the icon, is there an option to remove it?

 

Thanks for the reply. Not option to remove via right click!

 

Well, this one can be tricky. First of all, leave well enough alone unless you are comfortable editing the registry. If you are not sure what the instructions below mean, then stay away from this. Even if you think you know what you are doing, make sure you have a backup.

With these preparatories, here's the drill: Go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\Handlers. You will see a whole host of keys for the various event handlers there. From your screenshot, it looks like you are interested in one of the WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) keys. If you click through these, you will see the one(s) that are associated with Microsoft Word. Each of these keys has an entry for the DefaultIcon that's used in the dialog box you have shown. Find the one that points to a non-existent file, and replace it with a reference to the correct one.

The above is about as much advice on this as I'd want to give remotely. Things can get more complicated than this, in particular if you're on a 64-bit system. You can also delete (some of) these keys if you want to, but you may lose some useful functionality, and you should make sure to then also delete all associated references to these keys, in places like HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\EventHandlers\WPD, etc. This should be enough to get you started if you want to go there, but my advice at the beginning of this post applies, in spades...

 

Thank you very much for the warning and advice. I think I'm going to simply let it be, I do appreciate the time you took to respond to my inquiry, though.

Any idea how this happened / how I can prevent this from happening again in the future?

 

Typically you see things like what your screenshot shows when you upgrade to a newer software version (in your case my money is on you having upgraded Office). Very often, when the previous version is uninstalled, the Handler entries in the registry are not removed, which results in those broken links you have seen. The issue is entirely cosmetic, but I understand where you are coming from. The reason I knew what I told you was that this same thing annoyed me enough to figure out how to fix it.