Where did my icons go?

[Jason Warren]

The hard drive in my laptop failed. I replaced it and restored the
partitions and all is well. Well, almost... I have a dozen or so desktop
items and the icons associated with them are absent, replaced by the
generic Windows icon. I wonder if this is some kind of caching issue.
Does anybody know how to get them back? I can live without them but I'm
curious what might have happened.

TIA

Jason

 

[BillW50]

The hard drive in my laptop failed. I replaced it and restored the
partitions and all is well. Well, almost... I have a dozen or so
desktop
items and the icons associated with them are absent, replaced by the
generic Windows icon. I wonder if this is some kind of caching issue.
Does anybody know how to get them back? I can live without them but
I'm
curious what might have happened.

Yes it does sound like icon caching problem. So what happens if you try
this on one of the icons... right click properties and Change Icon under
the Shortcut tab? I am not suggesting you do this to all of them, just
try one and to see if it works.

 

[KCB]

The hard drive in my laptop failed. I replaced it and restored the
partitions and all is well. Well, almost... I have a dozen or so desktop
items and the icons associated with them are absent, replaced by the
generic Windows icon. I wonder if this is some kind of caching issue.
Does anybody know how to get them back? I can live without them but I'm
curious what might have happened.

TIA

Jason

This problem has been around for quite some time. Other users have reported
that booting into safe mode, then re-booting normally, has fixed it.

 

[Jason]

-snip-

Yes it does sound like icon caching problem. So what happens if you try
this on one of the icons... right click properties and Change Icon under
the Shortcut tab? I am not suggesting you do this to all of them, just
try one and to see if it works.

Recreating the icon cache fixed the problem. The first few articles I
came across on this said to delete iconcache.db and restart. That didn't
work. It turns out, as the 3rd article said, that Windows keeps a copy of
the cache in memory (caching the cache?!) and then writes it to disk on
shutdown. So, in addition to deleting the file, you have to kill the
shell with Task Manager. Upon restarting explorer.exe, the cache gets
rebuilt.

Jason