Desktop Icon Problems

Hey guys, great site! I'm hoping you guys can help me, and I'm confident you shall be able to! I am having a problem with desktop icons, for one thing, my recycle bin won't refresh (shows its empty when its not, and vice versa). I've tried correcting this via. other methods mentioned on this site, and also by running sfc /scannow, to no avail. Also, in addition to the recycle bin issue, my "Network" icon is not longer an icon of two computers, but instead an icon of a folder. (just like the "My Documents" folder). And lastly, when I click the right mouse button on the desktop and "Personalize", when I click the "Change Desktop Icons" link, the window is empty. In otherwords, it doesnt show any icons in the white space where it should show the My Computer icon, Network icon, ect. (I've included a screen shot of this in case it is confusing). I've clicked the "Restore Default" button, but no luck. I am baffled as to what is occuring here, any help on this matter is greatly appreciated!!

Look on this forum for a guide on how to rebuild your icon cache, this should fix it.

That is one of the methods I tried, It didn't work.

Ok, hold on a sec let me use my brain.

It seems like the shell32 system was manually edited, you can change icons so that they are different from their defaults. I know that in the tutorial page there's a fix for the recycling problem, its common. As for the icon I would try going to the network folder properties and see if you can't manually edit the icon.

I know I can access the shell32 file in the windows directory, but is there an easy way to restore/repair it?

If this is a recent problem you could system restore.

Did you try this method:


Use task manager to Kill explorer

open elevated cmd and type in: cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local

Then use this command to unhide iconcache.db

attrib -h IconCache.db

del iconCache.db

restart explorer.

Well I tried a less elaborate method of deleting the iconcache.db file, I changed my folder options to show all protected OS files, and I deleted the file from the directory (C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local), and I made sure to empty the recycle bin before restarting, this still didn't work. Is this process effectively the same process that you just described?

No it is different because you still have explorer open.

Try my way and then reboot rather than restarting explorer.

Just tried your method, no luck.

Well then I guess if it is of recent you should system restore as much as you can afford to.

Haha well, Idiot me, I turned off system restore long ago. So I'm SOL in that department. Oh well, I'll live with it until I hopefully figure it out. Thank you for your help, it has been greatly appreciated!

The download in that link did indeed fix the recycle bin problem! Thank you! however, I am still left with the two other issues unfortunately