arpproducticon.exe

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All of a sudden I’ve been running across this interesting thing…  When I empty the recycle bin I get an error message that “arpproducticon.exe cannot be deleted”.    Which is odd, as this file is not actually in the recycle bin…

However there are 230 instances of it in various windows installer locations….    It looks like it is some sort of an installer file (duh!) but why so many copies and is it doing any good?   It doesn’t seem to be any sort of malware and I dono’t suppose it wastes too much space but somehow I object to it.

Google doesn’t tell me much about it.  Anybody have any explanation?

 

Thanks Richard

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Richard Merchant wrote:

However there are 230 instances of it in various windows installer locations….

I have only 1 file dated from the date of first Windows 10 setup in 2018.

Which is odd, as this file is not actually in the recycle bin…

The file may have been set as hidden.

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As you surmised, arpproducticon.exe is part of the “InstallShield” program used by some developers to install S/W on Windows PC’s.

My particular computer only has 10 different ones as opposed to your 230, but they’re also all located in different sub-folders of the Windows\Installer folder.

They’re “suppose” to contain the product icon (the one shown immediately to the left of the name in Apps & features or Programs and Features) for the particular S/W being installed but, at least in my case, all but 1 of them contained the following “generic” windows program installer icon.

And 9 of the programs installed on my PC did in fact originally display that icon beside their names before I changed them to show the same icon as the program’s shortcut so I wouldn’t “accidentally” removed something important.

As for why you may be getting that error message…

Did you recently uninstall and/or update a program/app?

If so, the arpproducticon.exe file containing its program icon may have still been marked as a system file when it was moved to the recycle bin (thus hidden and unable to be deleted.)

The fix would be to “turn on” display of hidden system files in explorer, open the recycle bin, highlight the arpproducticon.exe file, and press the delete key on your keyboard.

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Thanks for the details.   I think I have so many instances of the program because I have way way too many programs installed.  Oh well.

The program is not in the recycle bin.   I’ll just have to wait and see if the “problem” happens again and then go and look again in the bin.

 

Cheers Richard

 

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