With a nod to GOT: “Rain is coming.”
To get ready for an estimated 2-3 day heavy rain event (that’s just the first wave of the wet walkers showing above) I’ve stocked up on tortillas, carnitas, taquitos, and all the fixings. Family is gathering and games are being dusted off from closets and shelves. I’ve got a pot of bodacious slow cooker charro beans on the stove that have been simmering since 8 AM this morning. Mmmmm.
A week or two ago, Malwarebytes came out with a new version release. It seemed to install fine on most of our systems, but on my main laptop, after the upgrade was completed, the desktop, start-menu program folder, and programs folder icons for the EXE were all not displaying the actual icon.
It looked very similar to this.
When I tried to reset the icon to the default, it should show in the icon selection choice normally, but still wouldn’t display it. Running the application also resulted in that same icon above shown above displaying in the task-bar.
Functionality of the app was fine.
I fiddled around for a while before starting to actual work specifically on fixing the issue.
Turns out this is a frequent issue with MBAM updates and it looked like I needed to rebuild my Windows Icon Cache.
Here are some different links for various versions of Windows with manual/automated tools to do so:
- How To Rebuild The Icon Cache In Windows 10 - Into Windows
- How To Rebuild Icon Cache In Windows 7 To Repair Icons - Into Windows
- Icon Cache Rebuilder For Windows 10/7 - Into Windows
- Rebuild the Icon cache in Windows 8 / 7 - The Windows Club
- Icon Cache Rebuilder: Repair, Rebuild corrupt icon cache in Windows - The Windows Club
- Thumbnail and Icon Cache Rebuilder for Windows 10 - The Windows Club
- Icons change incorrectly in Windows - Microsoft Support - KB 2396571 - FixIt tool
In the end I went with the Microsoft FixIt tool.
I did the custom option and only selected the repair for the Icon Cache as I wanted to retain my folder customizations.
I rebooted and…
All my desktop icons looked like the one above! What!!!
I panicked for just a moment then I noticed that it looked like the “normal” icons were just peeking out from behind all of those “blank” icons. What gives?
I thought about it for a moment and then remembered I had also applied a custom (mini) shortcut icon tweak to my system as I while I liked the shortcut arrow, the default Windows arrow was too big for my tastes so I went with a smaller one using this shortcut arrow tweaking tool. Looks like the MS FixIt nuked that custom shortcut overlay setting.
The original tweaking utility didn’t seem to work this time round for me after I made the change and rebooted. No change.
So I then tried the small “XP” style one in XdN Tweaker and after a reboot, all my icons were restored to their normal appearance and the mini-shortcut icon was back as well.
Nice!
So tip #1, rebuilding the Windows Icon Cache is a good trick to remember and tip #2, record the custom Windows tweaks you apply as they can have consequences when troubleshooting!
Cheers!
Claus Valca
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