QuickLaunch Icons Change on Restart

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My trusty SP3 machine has been solid for many years.
Lately, when I restart it my dozen or so quicklaunch icons change appearance and order.

I have removed every possible startup process except my display utility, MSE, and wireless adapter client with no help.

Watching the display at startup it seems like the icons start out fine but change when my display utility runs.
Does that make sense?

The only other anomaly I see is that occasionaly my wirless adapter setting to use Windows to configure its settings goes unchecked, dropping my wireless link. Resetting that resolves that problem. I can’t imagine the two are related.

I’m looking for suggestions for ways to do a restart that resolves the problem, then fix it for good.

What do you think?

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Normally it is not necessary to run a display utility. Are you saying that your display driver loads, or that the display config utility runs?

If it is simply that the display driver loads and then changes the screen proportions, etc., you might try running your display driver program and changing the settings.

What I suspect is happening is that Windows loads a basic display profile, which is what you first see. Then the video driver mfgr’s display driver loads, changing up the settings. This is what you see after a minute or two.

If it has worked for a long time, and all of a sudden it has problems, then here are the things I would check:

I would start by rebooting in VGA mode. Press F8 just as your Dell / HP / etc. splash screen goes off, and choose VGA Mode. The video will be low-grade, but if the problem no longer occurs, then you know that you have some sort of video problem:

* A Windows update got installed, and it somehow messed with the video.

* Perhaps your display driver got corrupted somehow. See if there is a newer version available.

* Your video card is going bad — perhaps it is overheating. Download and run Speedfan, to see if there is an overheating problem.

* Could be a memory problem of some sort. That happened sometimes in the Windows 3.1 days. Not sure if it is still applicable with XP.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Thanks for your thoughts. I’ll look into them further.

What I’ve found today is that if I lock the taskbar the problem goes away.
I can restore all my normal start-ups and the icons’ appearance and order is preserved.

That seems to say it’s a Windows issue or that Windows can control the issue, doesn’t it?

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1) search for “iconcache.db”
2) delete all instances of iconcache.db
3) shutdown, then – restart
4) shutdown, then – restart [sic!]

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For those who have this problem, I found a solution that worked for me:

http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/icon-cache-how-it-works-and-fixing-it/822.html

Apparently my aged XP had developed such a large iconcache.db that it was becoming unstable at startup and it took more than rebuilding it.
The registry tweak increases the max size of the cahe and solves the problem.

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