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Icons Tips
REPAIRING CORRUPTED ICONS ON WINDOWS DESKTOP
Sometimes you will find after booting your computer that
one or more of the icons on your desktop have become
corrupted. An icon for a totally different program may
appear, or there may be a generic icon. In order to
correct this problem, you need to force Windows to
rebuild a hidden file in your Windows directory called
ShellIconCache. This file is used to keep all the Desktop
icons so that they can be more quickly displayed. The
first thing you will need to do is make sure the
"Show All Files" option is on: start the
Windows Explorer, select the Tools menu (or the View menu
if you're using Windows 95) and click on Folder Options
(or Options, if you are using Windows 95); click the View
tab, and check the File and Folders branch of the display
in the Hidden Files section, put a check mark next to
"Show all files" (if Windows 95, put a check
mark on "Show All Files" and also remove the
check mark from "Hide MS-DOS file extensions of file
types that are registered"); click OK to save your
changes.
Now you need to start up Windows Explorer (or My
Computer) and find the ShellIconCache file. Right-click
on it, select Properties from the context menu, and
remove the check mark for Hidden on this file (by
clicking on it.) The next thing is to delete the
ShellIconCache file, which must be done outside of
Windows: click the Start button, choose Shutdown, select
the option for Restart in MS-DOS mode; when you get to
the DOS command prompt, type this command: "del
ShellIconCache". Now when you restart the computer
(type "exit"), Windows 9x/ME will rebuild the
ShellIconCache file from the icons in their original
source files.