Icon Problems

Recently had something happen with some of the icons on my Winodws 98 SE system. Can't pinpoint exactly what might have done it, or even exactly when, but most of the icons displayed in the "My Computer" folder, and the "Control Panel" folder are all messed up. There is also one icon on my desktop that's messed up. The icons that are messed up look now look like something's tried to combine two or three icon pictures into once icon picture. Oh yeah, some of the icons in my "Windows" folder are messed up too. Note that all of the programs and files still work fine, it's just the visual part of the icon that's all messed up. Also, if I change the view of the folder to anything but large icons (list, details, or small icons), everything looks normal. So that tells me that it's only the large icon pictures that are messed up. BUT, I can't figure out what caused this problem, or even how to fix it. Does anybody have any suggestions? It's one of these problems that's more annoying than anything. I never noticed just how much a person takes those icons for granted. All of a sudden, I'm looking for something that I know is there, but don't see it right off the bat because it looks totally different than it used to.

 

You can either...

Install* TweakUI from the Tools\Reskit\Powertoy folder on your Windows 98 CD (or download it from this site - be sure to get the one for 98, not the one for XP) and use its icon repair feature or...

You can do a search of the harddrive for a file called "shelliconcache," delete it when found and reboot. Windows will build a new one and that solves icon problems such as you're experiencing about 99% of the time.

*If you download it, to install it after unzipping the downloaded file, go to the folder where it unzipped to, locate the TWEAKUI.INF file, right-click it, and select Install.

 

And if none of that works, then you can always go to the view menu, select options, and go to fiel types, and then change the icons manually. This would be a last resort however, as you may have to change the icon for every single file extension, which could take a while

 

Great! The Tweak UI utility worked like a charm. Thanks for all the help. I never knew that utility even existed. After looking at it, looks like it's got some other features that will come in handy too.