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

2011-11-12T14:09:18+00:00

Did exactly as told by artnoir and it helped. Problem solved. Thanks.
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Anonymous

2011-11-30T15:07:07+00:00

Actually, it happened to me yesterday with MyPhoneExplorer. It has just suddenly happened with another program, MWSnap.

You're making it sound like it happens because people do something wrong. It's not the case, I was just browsing in Opera when the icons suddenly changed to the default icon in the task bar right before my eyes.

There is a bug somewhere in Windows 7. I didn't change or copy any files either. This is a brand new 4 days old laptop!

I really don't see how a normal user can do anything that makes the **system** unable to retrieve the correct icon for a program.

Everybody, you know what? When I try to set the icon via the Properties of the Start menu shortcut, I get a message that reads "cant' find %programfiles%\MyPhoneExplorer\ MyPhoneExplorer.exe". But guess what? Windows can launch the program. But in the same time it can't find the file!

I just can't believe this annoying bug hasn't been fixed and we are resorting to a kill/delete/restart workaround. Microsoft knows exactly all circumstances when an icon is replaced by the default icon. So why not trace the problem back to its actual root and fix it? Don't know how hard it would be to detect such circumstances and attempt a hardcoded hotfix before giving up and using the default icon.
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Anonymous

2011-12-20T18:23:18+00:00

Artnoir,

I have this issue, no icons appear at all, unless a hold the power button to shut down improperly, when I restart all icons appear. I am not very adept at computers and do not understand how to do that notepad solution. Can you help?

Thanks
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