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

2012-04-30T22:55:00+00:00

Many thanks to you artnoir - your solution worked perfectly for me as well. I am using Win7x32bit and hadn't been changing any icon locations etc.

My issue seemed to start shortly after applying my product registration key for the MS Office 2010 suite.

Love your work!
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Anonymous

2012-04-14T18:47:35+00:00

thanks for this solution! it worked great!
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Anonymous

2012-02-12T11:17:03+00:00

Thanks to everyone - I've tried all the posts in this conversation - none works on my Win7-64. I hate to do it but no other alternative except to re- install everything.

DO NOT REINSTALL!

This problem is not serious enough to resort to such an extreme measure. The workaround offered by Artnoir has worked for 100% of the people who tried it and reported here. You MUST have done something wrong.

Reinstalling is not a solution. As you can see from other posts, the icon problem is a recurrent problem. Are you going to reinstall every now and then?
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