Desktop Icons stop working

I'm on Win98SE....sometimes the icons on the desktop stop working. When i double click them nothing happens but if i right click on them and choose "open ", everything runs fine! everything runs fine too if i go to Start/Programs and run any app from that menu.

Rebooting the PC causes the icons to start working again for about a week.

NAV+Trojan Remover+AdAware+SpybotS&D+HijackThis are installed on my machine and don't find any viruses/parasites...

Anybody got any ideas on what could cause this?

Thanks in advance

 

I don't really know for sure what the problem is but I wonder if it could be a mouse problem. When it quits working, I'd try setting windows to open them with a single click and see what happens. To do this click start>settings>folder options. On the general tab either select "web style" or "custom, based on settings you choose. Then click on the settings button and tick the line that says single-click to open an item. Then give them a try.

Another thought. When the problem occurs, before trying the single click option, you could also have a look in the mouse applet in the control panel and if there's a setting for the double click speed, change it and see if that has any effect on it. MS Intellipoint software has this. There's a little folder icon there next to the slider that you can try it on. If yours has something similar, you might try double clicking that before you even change the speed setting just to see if the double click works there or not.

If one of these two things works, I'd suspect some sort of problem with your mouse or it's driver. I would tend to lean toward the driver though, as it seems to work fine when you reboot. When the problem occurs, take note of what programs you have running at the time. Could be that something that's running at the time doesn't get along well with your mouse driver.

 

You may just have a minor glitch in the registry. Here is something simple and real painless to try. Restart in Dos Mode, and use these two commands, the first will appear to do nothing.
scanreg /fix
scanreg /opt
Edit:fixed command order.

 

markp62

I am not advocating either way your suggestion with regard the problem but I would not reccommend the two commands in the given order.

I make the analogy with Scandisk and Defrag - we would not Defrag first.

If we use both scanreg switches then I would suggest:

scanreg /fix
scanreg /opt

This order is also preferred by Microsoft themselves.

As a BTW, an unofficial source at Microsoft suggests the combination be used three times in succession! I reckon this is a bit over the top but it seems to me that the reasoning is because an invalid structure may itself be embedded within the first and since /fix is not recursive the second invalid structure is missed on correcting the first. The likelihood of a third invalid structure within a second and so on seems to me to be sufficiently small to repeat the combination only once; if at all.

 

@ Zander:
waiting for the problem to occur again to try and test your tips, but if it were a mouse (Logitech) problem it could never be confined to Desktop icons only and rebooting would be very unlikely to fix it imho...


@ markp62:
running ScanReg with the /fix and /opt switches now (gammaepsilon order...)


well, now i just have to wait and see! btw THX every1 for posting back! i'll keep u informed asap...

 

I realize it's only the desktop icons but there's a difference between those and the start menu ones where the mouse is concerned. Those on the desktop require a double click and those in the start menu require only a single click. Likewise, when you right click and choose open on the desktop icons it only requires a single click on open.

As for rebooting curing the problem, if your mouse driver is encountering a problem of some sort, rebooting could very well take care of that. Those are my thoughts anyway. I could be way off base here but it is a possibility.

The next time this happens before trying to take any corrective action try to run a program out of windows explorer by double clicking on the exe file for the program. If the program doesn't run then, you'll know the problem isn't confined to just your desktop and that it most likely has nothing to do with the desktop shortcuts themselves.

 

This sounds interesting...

Some months ago i deleted indeed my "ShellIconCache" file from the Windows folder cos sometimes icons in Windows Explorer and/or on the Desktop (!) used to change randomly displaying incorrectly (wrong icons).

My records show also that i added the "Max Cached Icons" string value - with a value data of 4096 - to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

That problem was really solved and never happened again...but i'm now trying to remember if my "new" problem did start then or not...

Found now on Google this MSKB article which suggests a value data of 2000 for the "Max Cached Icons" string value!

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q132/6/68.asp

so i'm now removing that file again AND replacing the old 4096 value with the new one, hoping this can help!

As usual, i've just to wait and see...

 

I think we are going down the wrong path here. Changing the value from 4096 to 2000 will not solve your current problem and may introduce another.

I also doubt that deleting ShellIconCache will help either as it is simply a cache of icons and the object implies the icon not the icon implies the object.

I often delete ShellIconCache when designing my own icons when an icon is in current use, gets edited but is not used because the cache is not updated and the icon is taken from the cache and not the 'target'.

It won't do any harm to delete ShellIconCache and I hope my understanding is wrong.

 

hmmm...it happened again today, after running a full system scan with antivirus, antitrojan and antispyware programs!

i wish to add i realized this time that pausing the mouse pointer over a desktop icon - after they stopped working - did select TWO icons at random at the same time!

So, summing-up:

single-clicking option turned on since then...

i tried this...no problem at all, every app running fine!

done!

done!

Looking now for new drivers for my Logitech mouse...just in case...

In the meantime new suggestions will be welcome!