Spontaneous Icon Change

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When I woke my computer this morning (it was on overnight) I noticed that all of my RealPlayer files had spontaneously had their icon changed from RealPlayer icons to, oddly enough, the icon for the Canada Post Postal Code lookup software. While I rather like the spiffy red and white icon, it is a little disconcerting since I did absolutely nothing that I can think of to cause this to happen. I haven’t been anywhere near those type of display files in weeks.

Any ideas? I did a system scan with Norton Antivirus and I don’t recall being to any dicey websites recently. In addition, the RealPlayer files still work properly, only the icon has changed.

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Is this just on your desktop, or everywhere?

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You could delete the file C:WindowsShellIconCache and reboot.

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I got the bright idea to reboot and it has corrected itself. Clearly a flaky Windows moment.

Thanks for the quick replies.

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It’s always a good idea to see if rebooting makes a problem go away.

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This happened because your icon cache is full or corrupt. Rebooting sorts this out as the icon cahce is rebuilt, so does deleting the cache, easiest of all is to use the Repair option in TeakUI.

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If your IconCache is the source of the problem, it’s useful to tweak its size up form the puny default size. If you’re happy running Regedit, and making a single, simple change, here’s the location/ settings:

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer]
Value Name: Max Cached Icons
Data Type: REG_SZ (String Value)
Value Data: 100 – 4096 (default = 500) <– alter this value

Personally, I use the max allowable 4096 value.

Alan

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The problem fixed itself when I rebooted and has never been a problem before or since. I suspect the icon cache either got corrupted or my machine ran out of memory. I had been doing a lot of design work in Access around the time this happened and left the computer on for a few days. Windows 98 is not the most efficient of memory releasers… It is helpful to know about that feature in TweakUI which I have. I just don’t use it often these days.

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