I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 professional on my father's Toshiba Satellite laptop and everything went smoothly except for the fact that certain desktop shortcuts appear as a blank white page.
I've tried:
- going in and changing the icon to
many different things - reloading the icon cache by deleting
the IconCache.db file - uninstalling his Free AVG as he
heard the virus scanner might be
preventing it (it wasn't and he put
it back.)
The one thing these icons have in common is that they are shortcuts to some very old DOS executables. One of them is Word Star 2000 to give you an idea.
Does anybody have any other suggestions besides what we've tried?
Best Answer
From Fix Blank or White Shortcut Icons on Desktop.
EDIT
I tried it, and the same behavior is on Vista. Properties of such an icon has the same tabs as the command prompt (cmd), so I think the white page icon is a generic cmd prompt, and Windows treats these as shortcuts to cmd rather than themselves. That's why it's impossible to set their icon.
As another experiment, I created a shortcut to cmd.exe, then modified it to add the parameters of "-k old-prog.com". This time the icon-change worked, but the program didn't ! My conclusion is that the 32-bits cmd.exe cannot run these programs.
I think this is some weird effect of 16-bits emulation on Windows. Apparently the 16-bits cmd.exe doesn't accept icon changes. As 16-bits is now totally abandoned in Windows 64-bits, I don't think there is much point in reporting it to Microsoft.