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

2011-11-10T12:04:06+00:00

So, here is what I have found. I was cleaning up my hard drive the other day and I removed what I thought was unecessary files on my hard drive. This included files in the windows\installer directory. Come to find out, even though these files take up A LOT of space and seem unecessary, this is where Windows gets it's icons and uninstall infomation from. GO FIGURE that windows wouldn't make these protected files and warn you of the issue in deleting them. SO, in conclusion, if you have remove the files from the Windows\installer directory, you will never get the icons back unless you either re-install or uninstall and re-install the application (which one works I don't know because I have yet to try the solution, just found out the cause).

Just to say it, I am a devoted Microsoft fan and a strict user of their products (I make a living on their products) but it ceased to amaze me that they give the average user the ability to screw up their system so easily and then shrug their shoulders when we do it.
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Anonymous

2011-10-30T10:49:39+00:00

Working solution. Windows 7 x64. Thanks artnoir.
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Anonymous

2011-10-25T11:45:13+00:00

I had this problem only with VLC and I'm running Windows 7 32-bit, so I'm not sure why some posters are blaming Windows for this. I didn't change or copy any files related to VLC after installation, so I'm not sure what caused the problem.

My IconCache.db wasn't locked by any processes, so I just renamed it and restarted explorer.exe. No batch file needed. Worked perfectly!
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