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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!
It didn't help. I don't have Boxcryptor. However, I believe it has something to do with a similar issue. Just not sure which app caused it. If I recalled, it happened after I updated the OS.
I'm extremely disappointed by MS as they don't seem to care about all the complaints.
Hi C.Sa,
Thank you, a picture is worth a 1000 words. I see now that this is different than the one posted by Bob on page #1 of this discussion showing icon overlays on the desktop. As you saw from the many others that posted confirmations about the cause and thanks for solution, that was accurate on the desktop.
This is different and is not a file overlay (the Start screen doesn't show files). The x in your screenshot indicates a program is broken and cannot start.
Here is a pic showing what it looks like.
Well yes it's absolutely something to do with whatever that software is. But there's no programming inside the Windows operating system to draw an X symbol on an icon. The instructions to draw that simply do not exist: something else put it there.
