Wrong or missing program icons in windows 7 start menu

Anonymous

For unknown reasons my start menu and task bar has started showing the wrong icons.

For example Office Outlook and several other now has a generic program icon, while some other program icons are mixed up like notepad has the vlc media player icon, the icon for a game (city of heroes) has the Paint icon and so on.

I have no idea what has caused this. The strange thing is that in "all programs" the correct icons are showing but if I right click and add them to the start menu or task bar they get an erronous icon.

Tried system restore but it doesn't work.

if I create a new user account the correct icons show in that accounts startmenu/task bar.

I would preferably trying to get my main account back in order though because it's a lot of work moving to a new user account........

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Anonymous

I found a solution for this. At least it worked for me (win 7 x64).

First, open Notepad and paste the below code:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe

cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local

attrib –h IconCache.db

del IconCache.db

start explorer

save the file as a .bat file on your desktop.

Then open explorer and navigate to C:\users\username\appdata\local\ (make sure you've select to view hidden folders) and delete IconCache.db.

Lastly, double click on the .bat file that you saved on your desktop and all icons should be restored.

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Anonymous

Hi River99,

If the icons show properly using another user account, it is possible your user profile has been corrupted. Try the steps in this document to fix your profile.

Dena

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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57 additional answers

Anonymous

2010-06-10T23:58:50+00:00

Sending a shortcut to desktop then moving it to your desired folder works great to fix this. But sometimes the problem is worse. I've notice that on some programs, for whatever reason, after they are installed, the .exe loses it's icon. This has happend to me for programs in both 'Program Files' and 'Program Files (x86)'. I have found a solution but it requires some knowledge of Resource hacking. You'll need either 'Reshacker' or 'Restorator'. Run one of those programs and navigate to the .exe of the program that's lost it's icon (shows generic icon instead). Open up the icon resource and extract the program icon and save it somewhere as an .ico. Then use the assign option (Restorator) and assign the icon back to the .exe. Complicated for some but those who know how to resource hack will get this. Worked for me. I installed both Adobe PS CS3 and CS5 and both lost their icons. This solution fixed them both.
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Anonymous

2010-03-30T23:06:17+00:00

Yep, I've added some folders to the start menu to sort it by application type and to keep it small. Now if you have shortcuts where no path to the corresponding .exe file is given and moving it to another location the shortcut will loose its icon. You can circumvent this behaviour: Reboot the OS before moving any shortcuts. After a reboot you can move the shortcuts without loosing their icons. This is very, very annoying and Dena is funny... ;-)

bye

tom
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Anonymous

2010-03-30T00:57:51+00:00

I agree. I've had this happen first with Vista 32-bit and now it just happened with Win7 64-bit. This is a major annoyance to have to recreate my profiles and if there is a document on how to transfer corrupted profiles, clearly Microsoft needs to figure this bug out.
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