Why are icons missing for certain programs in Win7?

Question

For some of my programs, the icons have vanished. This applies to both the pinned Start Menu items and the programs in their program folders as well.

Inkscape and IrfanView have both had their icons disappear. SVG and image files associated with the respective programs still show the right icons -- it's just the main .exes that don't have icons any more.

How do I restore them?

Solution

Try the following.

Open Notepad and paste the below code.

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
cd /d %UserProfile%\AppData\Local
attrib –h IconCache.db
del IconCache.db
start explorer

save the file as a .bat file on your desktop.

Lastly, double click on the .bat file that you saved on your desktop and all icons should be restored.

_Source

Comments

[gronostaj]

Do you have any antivirus program running? Has it detected anything suspicious recently?

[JeanSibelius]

Yes, in fact -- Microsoft Security Essentials detected a very old virus on a very old IDE drive I plugged in a few days ago to retrieve a very old file.

[gronostaj]

Well, I guess that may be the cause of the problem. Try uninstaling and reinstalling Inkscape and IrfanView and see if it helps. Don't run them before this operation, also be sure to manually uninstall first and ensure no application files are left before reinstalling.

[volume one]

worked for me too, thank you @QMechanic73

[Jeremy]

If you are missing icons for windows explorer and notepad you may also need to delete the windows explorer icon and thumbnail cache databases in %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer however those files aren't immediately available for deletion after the taskkill command completes so it failed for me in a batch file. Maybe a short wait would help after the taskkill as well.