Repairing and Retoring Icons

• in Windows XP

The reasons are either the icon cache which stores this icon information is damaged or corrupted. Uninstalling TweakUI has also fixed the issue in some cases.

• in Windows Vista

Method 1: Refresing Icon Cache
1. Right-click on the Desktop.
2. Select Personalize and select Display Settings.
3. Change the Color from 32 bit to 16 bit and click Apply.
4. Change the Color back to 32 bit and click Apply.

Method 2: Rebuilding Icon Cache
1. Click on the Vista logo (similar to the "Start" button).
2. In the "Start Search" box type type CMD or CMD.EXE and Hit Enter.
3.You may need to kill explorer before rebuilding the icon cache.
To do this, following either of these:
A. Kill Explorer.exe from Task Manager.
B. Run the following line from the command prompt opened above:

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f

4. Run the following commands one by one as shown below to complete the task:

CD %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local
attrib –h IconCache.db
del IconCache.db

5. Run explorer.exe or restart your machine.