Icons disappearing in Windows 7

Im running Windows 7 Home Premium on my Envy 14, i love the machine as a whole but im getting wound up with windows 7.

90% of my icons within the explorer window are displayed as generic icons. I read through countless posts from a google search and everything points towards a corrupt iconcache.db file. I have purged/deleted/rebooted this file numerous times using numerous different methods and nothing seems to have worked. Can someone PLEASE tell me how to fix this?!?

This is really started to wind me up now. I managed to fix it once before but i cannot remember the method i used, and now its happened again. It took alot of thought for me to go for the Envy over a MBP and to be honest Windows 7 swung it for me, so now im rather annoyed that its this that is letting the system down.

Any help please?!?!

 

It works for everyone else perfectly fine. So the problem is with your system.
Many things can lead to such issue, anywhere from registry corruption, broken HDD, driver related issue, to malware and viruses.

The easy solution to fix your porblem is perform a system re-install (of course, backup your files first as they will be gone after the re-install for ever).

This time, install Microsoft Security Essential, and scan your backup files. This free protection software scans for viruses of all kinds, malware and spyware. It's one of the best free A/V tool you can't find in term of performance and finding these stuff. It also won numerous award including vb 100 test (were many, even paying ones can't pass).

Additionally, be sure you install software and download only from trusted source, and directly from the company own website.

Microsoft has a free to distribute online book on keeping your system secure:


And remember: Always use 1 a/v at a time (that means only 1 a/v installed on your system. Windows only supports 1, having 2 or more creates a conflict and result in not working properly). Moreover, anti-virus software can't heal virus/malware damages. Once the damage is done it's done, get your trusty Win7 disk and re-install away (or go back in time, if that system did not get broken).

Once you re-install be sure to get the latest drivers for your graphic card, sound card, motherboard chipset, SATA controller, Bluetooth (if you one), wireless card, Ethernet card, and any other peripheral installed on your system.

 

I dont think a corrupt iconcache has anything to do with malware or anti-malware.

 

Not directly... it could damage a system file or registry section which link each file association and folder to an icon. That is easy to do... execute a few delete registry String Value and a list of extensions and your done.

 

The problem isn't really clear. "90% of the icons" doesn't really help us much; we need a little more info. Which icons are not showing up, and is it just for certain file types? Also, are you talking about the graphical icons (like you see for Word, Excel, Adobe, etc.), or are you talking about the thumbnail/preview icon (where an image of the picture or video is displayed as the icon)?

I recently had an issue where the thumbnail/preview icons were no longer being generated for some of my video files. If that is the case for you as well, I am going to need to know what file types/extensions are affected. In my case, it was .mp4, .mpg, and .mpeg.

 

What you can try to do is delete the icon off the taskbar, search for it in the taskbar search thing, and then try to click add to taskbar from that area.
That's what works for me anyways.

 

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