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!
Grey x's on all desktop icons Windows 8.1
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.
Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage
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Anonymous
2014-08-07T16:29:30+00:00 I will send a snap the next time it happens which will most likely be within the next 24 hours. I cleared it last a few minutes ago and that's twice today so far. And my backup program is Norton and has been long before this ever happened. I have no icons pointing to any other drive but C:drive. I think the ones that don't have it are not the same each time but wasn't watching for that. I noticed that my YouTube, iTunes, and Mozilla icons were not affected this last round. Only about 8 of 53 were not affected this last time. I'll watch more carefully this next round and grab a screen shot as well.
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Anonymous
2014-08-08T00:50:14+00:00 Here's a screen shot from the 4th time the grey "X" appeared in the desktop icons just today.
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@CmdrKeene 90,631 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator2014-08-08T01:09:11+00:00 That's the Norton online backup indicator.
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Anonymous
2014-08-08T01:28:27+00:00 Why is it suddenly doing that over the past two weeks when it never did it before? I've not changed my Norton settings in the 7 months it's been on this computer. How do I make it stop?