How To Rebuild Icon Cache In Windows 7 – Fix Corrupted Icons

Incorrectly displayed icons are some of the most common yet annoying problems a Windows user can face and the fix is simple, rebuild icon cache. Users who frequently apply transformation packs/themes and the like run into this problem. What usually happens is, icons displayed on any part of the GUI, be it the start menu or desktop are corrupted or show entirely wrong icons meant for other files. This happens because Windows messes up the icon cache. To speed up performance, Windows caches all icons at a single place. If icons are repeatedly modified, this cache can get corrupted and files are assigned incorrect or corrupted icons.

The fix for this problem is quite simple and doesn’t require too much effort, however it’s good if you have a system restore point ready just in case. So here’s what you have to do to rebuild icon cache.

Steps to rebuild icon cache:

Step 1 – Open “Computer” or anything in Windows Explorer.

Step 2 – Click “Organize”, then navigate to “Folder and search options”.

Step 3 – Under the “View” tab, set it to “Show hidden files, folders and drives” as given below and click Apply.

Step 4 – Now navigate to “C:\Users\*Username*\AppData\Local”. delete the file named “IconCache.db”. Here *Username* is whatever user account you are using currently.

Step 5 – Delete the file named “IconCache.db”.

Step 6 – Reboot your computer and all icons will be displayed correctly if all steps were followed.

Instead of rebooting you can also simply stop and restart the “explorer.exe” service from the task manager. After everything is done I recommend that you set the folder view to default where hidden files, folders and drives are not shown for safety’s sake. It can be quite a bit of headache if that all important Windows file is deleted by mistake or someone fiddles around with files and folders they shouldn’t be seeing. Alternately, if you’re uncomfortable with doing this manually, you can get a little tool that will do all the work, not that there’s much anyway. You can get the icon cache rebuilder tool from here.

That’s how to fix corrupted icons and rebuild your icon cache. Please leave us your comments, suggestions or any questions below!