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Recently a client discover that all of their desktop icons (files and shortcuts) have large Grey X's in the corner on their Windows 8.1 home PC. The files are still accessible upon click through to them. They do not have a tape drive (one possible cause I have seen) and the shortcuts point to various locations on the primary C: drive (documents folder etc). Repairing the icon cache temporarily resolved but it seems to just come back again. They are running Carbonite as a backup, however a brief search of "Carbonite with Grey X's on icons" has not yet yielded anything either. Any help would be welcomed.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I experienced the problem for the first time ever this morning in one of my laptops After tracking what I did this morning that might had caused it, I finally remembered to have installed an update for Boxcryptor. After uninstalling the Boxcryptor app, the grey X's disappeared from all those folder its was on. Bingo! Hope it helps!
OK. I'm having the same problem, but only after I upgraded to Windows 10. I never had this problem with Win 7, Win 8, nor Win 8.1. Shortly after upgrading, desktop icons had the gray X's, as follows:
I read your instructions above and ran SysInternals AutoRuns. I saw some Samsung entries and unchecked those (I am using a Samsung computer).
After that, I logged off, logged back on, and the gray X's were GONE for all files on the desktop. HOWEVER, if I put a new item on the desktop, that item will have a gray X. Further, for all the old items, instead of a gray X, they all now have the rounded arrow indicating a shortcut.
These are NOT shortcuts. They are Word files, PDF files, etc. but definitely not shortcuts. And, again, if I add another item to the desktop, that item will have the gray X and not the shortcut.
Anyone have any idea what's going on?
I posted earlier about the AutoRuns tool that shows you which programs are responsible and gives you a single easy checkbox to turn them off. Please review and let me know if you have any questions.
i seem to have this problem as of today as well
however i dont have it on 8.1
neither do i have a tape drive
NOR do i use norton
(i use avg without back ups)
i never ever used a back up program and wont ever use one cause i manualy back everything up to a seperate hard drive
as of today tho all my shortcut files and text files started having grey X's on them
and i want them gone
It might also be "OneDrive for Business" if you use a SharePoint file server.
But here's how to just flat-out find the culprit:
If you have another service that can handle icon overlays it would be listed here as well. To kill one off, just uncheck the box.
Warning: This tool can seriously damage your computer if used incorrectly. Turning off a shell icon overlay is completely safe, but please use caution when exploring this tool.
