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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!
Hi, Christian here from Boxcryptor,
we've investigated this issue some time ago and could not find a direct link of this issue to our app. As a matter of fact, we were able to get the same issue with and without Boxcryptor installed. The icons themselfes are not from us, either - we tracked them down to OneDrive directly, if I remember correctly.
What seems likely is that, by uninstalling Boxcryptor, a lot of Windows-internal caches get flushed, which resolves the issue as a side effect.
To better understand the real origin of the issue, it would help to get some insider info from an OneDrive developer about the conditions at which the grey x's appear.
Best regards,
Christian
It happened to me this afternoon, refreshing the desktop did the job.
Regards!
