Drive Icons Get Corrupt or Replaced on Medium Settings

The problem of missing or corrupt drive icons have been encountered earlier both in Vista and Windows 7.  While the original icons seem to show up temporarily during a disk scan or when icon sizes are changed from large to small or vice versa, they are not permanently reset.  Setting the display size to medium too does not offer respite across all problem areas – the desktop icon may display fine while those on the Windows Explorer may not.

First you could restore your system to an earlier state using an existing restore point and check if the icon settings are default from there. If not too many icons are affected, you could manually right click on icon->properties and get back to the default setting.

If none of this works, move on to clear the cached icon details. To access the icon cache, make all the hidden files/folders on the system visible and get to the “C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\” folder. Locate and delete the “IconCache.db” file. Reset the hidden files to be invisible again. On restart or relogon the cache file will get rebuilt, clearing any custom setting.  If the method is not successful, follow the same steps to delete the file. Manually create an empty file and save as IconCache.db and set the file properties to read only. Make the file writable once you restart your computer.

Another fix to this issue comes in the form a registry hack. Do back up the registry to avoid accidental data loss. Using the” Regedit.exe”, look for the following folder and delete it. A subsequent restart will restore the default icons.

“HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\Shell Icons”

While in Vista and Windows 7, you will be able to locate the “Shell Icons” folder; to apply the same on other Windows versions look for “Drive Icons” folder instead.