adobe-readericonsmicrosoft-officewindows xp
It seems like Windows XP doesn't recognize default icons of many applications in my old Dell machine e.g. Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office 2003. Though I can open all those applications, the most annoying part is that all files associated with them don't have icons too and I cannot get their types by glancing at their icons. Is there a way to fix this without reinstalling Windows and all softwares?
FYI I have tried TweakUI and cleared icon cache but it didn't work.
You only explicitly mention the desktop. Are files in other folders affected?
Try deleting any thumbs.db file that exists. You may have to enable the display of hidden and system files to see it. Those files are safe to delete (thumbnail cache) and will be automatically regenerated by Windows.
This may be caused by a faulty shell extension. Have you installed anything recently?
Take a look at installed shell extensions with ShellExView.
Go to Options => Filter By Extension Type; hold shift and select Icon Handler, Icon Overlay Handler and Thumbnail. Is there anything there that was recently installed?
Try sorting by the File Created Time and CLSID Modified Time columns. Any items modified around the time you first noticed this?
You can safely disable shell extensions to test, using the right click context menu. You may need to restart explorer.exe to force it to reload/unload any changed extensions.
You could try a repair installation of Microsoft Office. There is a chance that the icon files, etc., got corrupted and a repair installation should fix that. You might need to do so from the installation DVD if you have deleted the cached installation files (which are quite large).
You may also wish to run sfc /scannow to verify and repair any corrupted or missing system files.
You could also try a System Restore to a point before this first started happening. There is a chance that a Windows update corrupted necessary files, especially if an unclean shutdown occurred.
Thank you mpy, you directed me to a forum with useful information. Rebuilding the icon cache did not do the trick. But that website also had registry settings to restore the default settings for file types: default-file-type-associations
So i found out that *.zip file type is a little bit special and has settings in:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.zip]
All i had to do was completely remove this key and all its subkeys. Then i had to re-login again, and the zip file icon was finally fixed:
Best Answer
You can delete the
Iconcache.dbfile in the application data location and restart machine to fix the corrupted Windows XP icons. It will rebuild it while reboot.default location of
Iconcache.dbis in (hidden file)C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data