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If you found yourself in a position that a few of your Windows icons are not displaying correctly with the corresponding icon of the file or the Icon Cache is corrupted. Follow this tutorial, you will be purging and rebuilding the icon cache batabase.

An example of this bad behavior of Windows is when you have ZIP files and instead of displaying the default ZIP icon is displaying, let's say a Windows Media Player Icon.

Windows caches or saves all icon preferences automatically to a single database that is called IconCache.db.

This file is hidden and sometimes can be corrupted by 3rd party applications and improperly override preferences.

Follow these steps to complete this task.

First we need to unhide all the files in Windows.

1. Go to Control Panel

2. Find and click on Folder Options.

3. Inside Folder Options click on the tab View.

4. Select radio button “Show hidden files and folders” click on Apply or OK.

The location of the iconcache.db file is on different places depending if the version of your Windows.

On Windows 7 and Windows Vista

5.A. Go to the following address in Windows Explorer C:UsersUser NameAppDataLocal or %UserProfile%AppDataLocal and delete the file IconCache.db

User Name applies to whatever name you are using on your computer.

On Windows XP

5.B. Go to the following address in Windows Explorer: C:Documents and SettingsUser NameLocal SettingsApplication Data or %UserProfile%Local SettingsApplication Data and delete the file IconCache.db

User Name applies to whatever name you are using on your computer.

6. Now restart your PC, on next boot Windows will start icon caching from scratch.

Second Option

1. Close every program in your computer.

2. Open Task Manager using the CTRL+SHIFT+ESC key sequence, or by clicking CTRL+ALT+DELETE

3. Click in the Process tab and find under the column Image Name find the explorer.exe process, right click on that process and select End Process.

4. Click on the End process button again for confirmation.

5. From the File menu in the Task Manager, select New Task (Run…)

6. Type CMD.EXE, and click OK

7. While you are inside the Command Prompt window, type the commands one by one and press ENTER after each command:

Firs type:
7.1. CD /d %userprofile%AppDataLocal  (Hit Enter)

Then type:
7.2. DEL IconCache.db /a (Hit Enter)

Finally type:
7.3. EXIT (Hit Enter)

8. In Task Manager, click File, select New Task (Run…)

9. Type EXPLORER.EXE, and click OK.

You are done.