If you find that one or more of your icons are not displaying correctly, or that your icon cache is corrupted, you might want to consider rebuilding your icon cache.
Method 1
Open Windows Explorer, and configure your Folder Options > Views to show Hidden / System Files. Next go to C:\Users\Owner\AppData\Local folder and delete the hidden IconCache.db file. Reboot. This action will purge and rebuild the icon cache.
Method 2
Kill Explorer.exe process.To do so follow this procedure
click Start button > Hold down Ctrl+Shift & Right Click on empty area in the Start Menu > Click “Exit Explorer”.
Click Ctrl+Shift+Esc keys and open Task Manager.
Click File > New Task > cmd.exe > OK. This will open the command prompt.
Type cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
Click OK
Type attrib –h IconCache.db
Click OK
Type del IconCache.db
Click OK
Type start explorer
Click OK.
Your Vista Icon Cache would have been rebuilt.
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What’s the benefit of clearing the cache?
To automate this process open note pad and paste the code below, save it to desktop as RefreshIcons.bat, double click on the file and you are all set. You can do the every time the icon cache needs to be rebuild. Make sure all you applications are closed whenevr you run this.
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
attrib –h IconCache.db
del IconCache.db
start explorer
I just used Resource Hacker to change a program’s icon, but didn’t like the final result, so I restored the original .EXE backup. The original icon didn’t come back, so I got it back by rebuilding the cache.
Thanks for the tutorial
the first method worked for me- restored all but my itunes icon. The itunes icon was the first to go currupt- it started out as the ’3 fish’ corrupt icon- and then went to a ‘notepad’ corrupt icon. So am I sol on this? or will it come back shortly?
Thanks a lot. It worked for me by clearing the cache using Method2.