Icons missing in Windows 7

Anyone know why certain icons have become the "default" (I guess) icons? I first noticed it after DPI scaling. I tried changing the dpi back and resetting the icon cache. A picture is attached. As you can see, Word's icon is missing, and the icon on the taskbar is skype, which is also missing an icon. Other programs work fine. It's weird.

 

This happened to me the other night. Do this:

Delete the file IconCache.db in C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local

Create a new empty file named IconCache.db in the same folder. This can be done, for example, by opening Notepad and doing nothing but going to save, entering the aforementioned file name exactly as written, and clicking save.

Right click the file you have just created and make it Read Only. Vital step!!

Reboot the computer. All your icons are recreated correctly.

Go to the IconCache.db file you created and uncheck the Read Only box.

Rep me

 

I would rep if the solution worked . When I said I "reset my icon cache" that's what I meant I did. It didn't help. :-|

Just for kicks, I tried it again. No luck. Any other suggestions?

 

Several months ago I had much the same issue with a few different icons for programs but no overall solution. Reseting the Icon Cache also did not resolve this particular issue for me either.

What I did was just recreate the shortcuts for those few programs which had no icons from the original program location. For example, for Word I created a new desktop shortcut from the Winword.exe file. If the icon was still incorrect I right clicked on the shortcut and replaced the icon with the correct one. Once the icon was correctly displayed I just deleted the shortcuts with the incorrect icon display and replaced them with the new shortcut.

I never did find out what caused the problem but once the correct icons were displayed I never had a issue again.

I know this is not an all encompassing solution but it might solve your immediate and future issues as it did mine.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, it's seems to have worked ok. I still would like to know what caused it though. It's strange, even if I tried to manually change the icon of the shortcut, the "change icon" button is grayed out. I ended up dragging winword.exe and skype.exe to the start bar and deleting the old ones, which worked.

 

thats weird that the icon cache reset wouldn't work... very strange indeed. Let us know what solution you find

 

Try the registry fix listed here.

* Press [Windows R], type [regedit] and hit [enter]

* Navigate to the Registry key HKCU \Software \Classes \LocalSettings \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \TrayNotify

* Make a backup of the Registry key by right-clicking on TrayNotify and selecting Export.

* Now delete the following two Registry keys: IconStreams and PastIconsStream

* Open the Windows Task Manager with [Ctrl Shift Esc]

* Terminate the explorer.exe process

* Click on File > New Task Run and enter explorer.exe to reload the explorer process

 

I tried that to no avail. I have attached another screen shot. Using deeastman's method I was able to remedy the main programs I used with the problem. The ones showed look as if the shortcut is invalid, but it's not.

 

Could be related to the System Maintenance Troubleshooter, which cleans up icons and broken shortcuts every week. You could try turning it off, but I prefer to keep it on and just deal with the problems it creates. It eats up my desktop shortcuts every so often because it finds some of them broken.

Desktop shortcuts disappear in Windows 7

Just a guess.

 

That was my first thought that it was broken. Unfortunately, the shortcuts work just fine.

 

So, any additional ideas anyone?