How To Rebuild Icon Cache In Windows 7 To Repair Icons
Posted March 2, 2010 – 5:03 pm in: Windows 7 GuidesWindows users often complain about corrupted desktop and explorer icons. Like in Windows XP and Vista, Windows 7 icons also may get corrupted when you try to install third-party visual enhancers, especially transformation packs.
If for any reason, one or more Windows 7 icons are not showing correctly, you can repair by rebuilding the icon cache. Icon cache is a hidden file located at the Local Folder. Here is how to do it:
1. Open Windows Explorer (any folder/drive).
2. As the IconCache is a hidden file, you need to enable “Show hidden files” option to see the same. To do this, head over to Tools > Folder Options, switch to View tab, and finally enable Show Hidden files, folders, and drives option.
3. Now navigate to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local folder and then delete IconCache.db file. Here username is your user profile name.
4. Reboot your computer to rebuild the icon cache.
5. All icons should be displayed correct now.
Tags: Icon Cache, Rebuild Icon Cache, Windows 7- How to get Windows 8 Start screen with live tiles in Windows 7
- How to get Windows 8 betta fish boot screen in Windows 7
- How to get Windows 8 Taskbar user picture tile in Windows 7
- How to get Windows 8 lock screen and sidebar menu in Windows 7
- How to get Windows 8 Start screen like home page web browsers
- How to get Windows 8 logon screen date and time in Windows 7
- 14 Excellent Windows 7 themes
- How to make bootable USB
- 27 Beautiful Vista logon screens
- How to install Windows 7 from USB
- Remove Watermark from Windows 7 desktop
5 Comments
Deleting the *.db file and rebooting the computer did not solve the corrupted icon problem.
thank you anyway.
you can help me rebuild icon on win7
Hello Lou, and welcome to Seven Forums.
You might see if changing the shortcut’s icon back to the correct default one a few times may be able to restore it.
If not, then recreate the shortcut’s directly from the program’s EXE file to see if they display properly.
Hope this helps,
Hello guys I need your help… I currently run windows 7 on my computer. My problem is a little bit different from tthe one above.
I followed ANH BEO’s suggestion and I created new shortcuts from the .exe files. Now I finally have all the Office 2007 programs correctly displaying on my computer. Anyway it didn’t help to get back the files’ icons(Excel, Word, Outlook…). I mean apart from the Power Point files, all the others do not display the correct icon(right now they all have a white squared icon with a little windows window inside). How can I change that?? Please help, I’m getting nut!!!
Thanks
I have multiple programs in my Start menu which display the incorrect icon, but if I rename them, they display correctly. Naming them back takes them back to the corrupt icon again. Same goes for the executable file they’re linked to.
Your solution worked perfectly for me! Thanks!
Tip: You don’t actually need to restart Windows; shutting down and relaunching explorer.exe is all that’s required to rebuild the cache once you’ve removed/renamed it.