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Wrong or missing program icons in windows 7 start menu

For unknown reasons my start menu and task bar has started showing the wrong icons. 

For example Office Outlook and several other now has a generic program icon, while some other program icons are mixed up like notepad has the vlc media player icon, the icon for a game (city of heroes) has the Paint icon and so on.

I have no idea what has caused this. The strange thing is that in "all programs" the correct icons are showing but if I right click and add them to the start menu or task bar they get an erronous icon. 

Tried system restore but it doesn't work.

if I create a new user account the correct icons show in that accounts startmenu/task bar.

I would preferably trying to get my main account back in order though because it's a lot of work moving to a new user account........
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I found a solution for this. At least it worked for me (win 7 x64).

 

First, open Notepad and paste the below code:

 

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
attrib –h IconCache.db
del IconCache.db
start explorer

save the file as a .bat file on your desktop.

Then open explorer and navigate to C:\users\username\appdata\local\ (make sure you've select to view hidden folders) and delete IconCache.db.

 

Lastly, double click on the .bat file that you saved on your desktop and all icons should be restored.

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Hi River99,

If the icons show properly using another user account, it is possible your user profile has been corrupted.  Try the steps in this document to fix your profile. 

Dena
Microsoft Answers Support Engineer
Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.
Dena

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Last updated March 26, 2025 Views 166,321 Applies to: