shortcut icons missing picture

[ekÆsine]

my employer is having a problem with winxp where most of his program shortcuts like the desktop icons and start menu icons are missing the picture that is associate with the program. so for example adobe acrobat shorcut on the desktop has a generic grey box image instead of the red squarish icon that it normally has.

some of the icons we can select and hit F5 to refresh and the right picture comes back, sometimes it doen't work. i tried searching microsoft.com, but maybe i am typing in the wrong search words. i can't find any knowledgebase articles. we did a system restore to yesterday when it did not have this problem, it fixed nothing.

 

[preet2u]

This happens when the icon cache is corrupted .. u need to rebuild the icon cache ... n' things will be fine ..

 

[NIS240SHU]

I was just about to post a similar question when I saw this topic. The same this is happening to me on my work PC, but the problem is limited to Word and Excel. This PC is running on Windows Me.

Would you care to elaborate on how to rebuild that cache?

 

[ekÆsine]

yes preet2u how do you rebuild an icon cache?

-edit
oops found it. thanks preet for pointing out the problem, muchos gracia senior.

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=56

 

[preet2u]

The Easiest way is to refresh the icon cache by deleting the IconCache.db file from your profile directory (usually /Documents and Settings/Username/Local Settings/Application Data). It will be automatically recreated.

*note* it's a system file n' is hidden .. so make sure u check the show all files

Alternatively you can do this using TweakUI, go under the "Repair" section down at the bottom of the window.

TweakUI Download
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe

 

[Shakie]

Good stuff preet... good tip to log into memory.

 

[preet2u]

Anytime Guy ... anytime