Resolved Changing File Icon Redux

I'm new, and a google search brought me here. I want to follow up on this closed thread: http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/87151-cant-change-default-txt-file-icon.html

I am a very experienced Windows user but my issue has me stumped. The method for changing a file icon displayed in Windows Explorer, discussed in that thread, simply does not work in my case.

Something or other changed the icon for AVI files, to the Windows Media Player colored-circle. I'm trying to put it back to the VLC "traffic cone" icon, as I had it before.

When I do the steps to change the icon in File Types -> Advanced. the WMP icon is shown next to the AVI filetype in the Extensions list.

When I display the filetype, it shows me the correct "traffic cone ". and when I click on "change icon ", it says, yes, yes, the icon is the VLC one that you want.

Just to be sure, I "change" it to what it already is.
Then I click OK, Save, goodbye, back to Windows -- and the icon displayed in Windows Explorer is still the WMP icon, even after reboot.

Double-clicking any AVI file opens it in VLC, so the association itself is correct, but something's buggering the icon displayed. (If I go back to the File Types display, the WMP icon is still shown next to AVI in the File Extensions list.)

What's going on? How do I fix the icon, and why doesn't the suggested method work? Does something ELSE really control the icon displayed, and if so, how to I change that?

 

Hi Bagby

perhaps try repairing the icon cache? - I use TweakUI for this purpose, there may be other ways

the icons you see when Windows is running are held in a cache for quick access - which makes sense if you think about it, if every icon on your screen had to be fetched from the original files it would take forever, plus think of all the files which would be opening unnecessarily

but the cache can get corrupted, which causes the wrong icon(s) to display; rebuilding/repairing the explorer icon cache mends this situation

best wishes, HJ.

 

Following on from HJ's post... If you don't already have it, TweakUI and other XP power toys can be found here.

 

good shot with the link, Wildfire nice one

very best, HJ.

 

I did try that, both using Tweakui and manually deleting the cache, but alas, it made no difference. But thanks for the idea, it was worth a shot.

Any other ideas about what could be causing this?

 

puzzling

what happens if you try to change the icon to something else altogether - preferably from a completely different executable or icon(s) file; I'm guessing that it would probably stay with the WMP icon, but is this actually the case?

(to determine whether your machine somehow has a "dislike" of the VLC traffic cone; or is it so "fond" of the WMP icon that it refuses to give it up)

which version of Media Player is it, pls?

best wishes, HJ.

 

here's a thing you could try fairly quickly: try changing your colour depth e.g. from 32 bit down to 16 bit, then set it back up to 32 bit again

after this, you would probably need to restart (at least the explorer.exe shell) to reload the icons from the cache file into memory

I think what might be going on is that individual icons can get "stuck" in an inappropriate colour depth; so when you try to change the icon or rebuild the icon cache it's setting up a perfectly good new 32bit colour icon, but what you are actually seeing is the 16bit colour version of the icon which hasn't been updated

changing your overall screen colour depth "mends" Windows memory of which colour depth to use for each icon

best wishes, HJ.

 

It's WMP v11.0
Other filetypes do display VLC as their associated application properly, so I'm pretty sure it's not a systemwide issue. (For example, .MP4 displays correctly.)

I can't recall whether I rebooted after deleting the font cache -- should not matter, since I manually killed all instances of explorer.exe as part of the process -- but I did reboot now.

When I went to work with this issue afterwards, the AVI filetype was gone, not listed at all anymore. (!)

I did not delete it, though deleting and re-adding the filetype was one of the things I tried yesterday morning when I was first working with this. So perhaps it's the combination of those things, deleting the filetype and deleting the icon cache?

In any event, creating the filetype anew and manually associating it with VLC this morning made it now display properly in Windows Explorer. The issue is resolved, but hanged if I know why. Or why it was an issue in the first place. This is very unsatisfactory.

So weird. Thanks for your collective help!

 

Thanks for letting us know...

Please mark your thread as 'Resolved'.

 

I am having this same issue with .mp3 files -- they're assigned to open with VLC, the icon's been hijacked to WMP -- and none of the steps I've taken change the way it's displayed in Windows Explorer.

I tried deleting the filetype, then deleting the icon cache, rebooting, recreating the filetype and setting it to open with VLC, but all mp3's still show up with the WMP icon.

So, whatever I did that resolved the .avi issue, must have been something else.

(This all began when I installed a conversion application that hijacked many file associations without asking. Grrr.) Apparently there's a deeper layer to file-icon association that I don't know anything about.

Does anyone have any ideas about where to go from here?

 

Bagby - are you still having trouble with this issue? I've turned up something which would probably help debug the situation.

If you are still having trouble with the mp3 filetype, let us know and I'll post it up; but if you've solved it or the problem has vanished like for the AVIs, there wouldn't be much point...

best wishes, HJ.

 

While I resovled the issue with .avi's, I handled the mp3 problem by installing CometPlayer and letting it take over the filetype.

I sure wouldn't say that I had "solved" either issue, and would love to know why it happened, how to take control of Windows Explorer's icon display and why the things I did try, did not work as expected. So please do post more.

 

Bagby - thanks for your patience

I think that IconCache.db is probably a bit of a red herring - because it's a per user account thing. On my XP computer I normally run as a limited user, so I can't even alter the icons; but going in on my admin account and searching for IconCache.db, I find 3 instances: in my limited user profile, in my admin profile, and in the hidden administrator account's profile. And they're all different sizes, and they all wear different timestamps! (but the appearance of the icons is a global thing, shared by all the profiles...) Plus, when I alter an icon, or rebuild with TweakUI, the timestamps don't change. Hmmm.

So: you've been doing some pretty drastic stuff to IconCache.db without it doing what you want to the icons; whereas I've been doing what I want to the icons without it seeming to do a lot to IconCache.db - maybe it might be better looking somewhere else for a "prime mover" which selects which icon to show.

Considering the problem overall as you described it suggested a couple of possibilities:
i) that you're changing something (and I'm sure that you're changing it OK, you seem to be going through all the right moves); but that the "something" which you've been changing isn't the same "thing" that's controlling the appearance of the icon;
ii) that you've been changing the correct "thing" to alter the icon's appearance; but that something else has been changing it back again afterwards

Along the lines of ii) : I've come across media file software which comes with an "agent" (or the like) to "helpfully" maintain your file types, in case some other software tries to assume control of them. I wonder whether the converter app. which started your woes might not have uninstalled properly / perhaps left a little bit behind?

==

Having convinced myself that IconCache.db didn't have a lot to do with what I was looking for, I started looking elsewhere - the obvious place being in the registry; it didn't take long to find the relevant key for .AVI files in the root hive. Having found the key, I decided to try to track through the chain of events from Folder Options > File Types > Advanced which leads to the icon actually changing.

Having exported the original value of the registry key (as a "safety net "), I tried modifying the entry for .AVI files to see how directly this change would affect the AVI file icons:
- beforehand, I'd changed the icon for .AVI files to moricons.dll,22 to give myself a "sore thumb" to work with (bright yellow "face" stands out easily in a long list of icons; plus, there are many entries to Windows Media Player and its executable in my registry, but there are very few references to moricons dll to make hunting easier).
- here's the test setup on my desktop, the yellow face is moricons.dll,22;
- I modify the relevant key to moricons.dll,66 (it's a dark blue triangle);
- Windows Explorer > Folder Options > File Types and still no change;
- but hit the Advanced button, and the new icon shows up only! in Edit File Type;
- clicking OK on Edit File Type, the new icon appears (all over the place!) (no refresh needed)

I didn't need to close Windows Explorer, or even close File Types to see the effect of an altered registry key, it picks up the new value at the point the Advanced button is clicked to raise Edit File Type; further, I found that I could even leave myself logged in on another profile and this would still work. BTW, the change did "couple through" to the other profile immediately, and without updating (either profile's) IconCache.db.

To complete the picture, I started by Folder Options > File Types > Advanced and picked a new icon by the "normal" method. This didn't immediately show up as a new value for the registry key - I needed to refresh the registry editor to see the change.

It struck me that (should you encounter the same issue again) you could use this in several ways to help ascertain where in the chain of events things are fouling up:
- try the normal Edit File Type route - does it even alter the registry key? (refresh, wait a mo, refresh again in case something is "helpfully" changing it back again!)
- try modifying the registry key manually (again, refresh after a moment just in case something's setting it back again) - does the new icon show up at the Edit File Type stage? and, if it gets that far, can you click OK and update the appearance of your desktop etc. icons?

Somewhere the chain of events must have been breaking down - find out where, and you might be able to narrow down what to investigate next.

==

notes:
- screengrabs etc. above using XPHome SP3 (fully patched) & WMP9;
- "icon cache" : lots of references to "rebuilding the Windows icon cache" "deleting the icon cache" etc. on the internet do not actually say what they mean by "icon cache "! It tempting to think that these refer to IconCache.db simply because of the name - some even mention ShellIconCache (though mainly in the context of not being able to find it on XP!); but I'm left wondering whether the cache which matters is actually a cache in memory;
- XPSP2 : I suspect that a pretty fundamental change in the way WindowsXP handles icons came along with the arrival of SP2. If so, it might account for some seemingly contradictory information about this subject on the internet simply because some of the pages were written pre-SP2.

best wishes, HJ.

 

Thanks for all your efforts! I appreciate your taking time to look at this.

I followed your steps and also did some variations. I tried just blanking the DefaultIcon pathname.

Windows really loves to hang on to things, so in the Filetypes dialogue, would not show me the "advanced" button until I "reverted" the setting back to WMP. Then, under advanced, I changed the icon, deleted the "Open" command and edited the "Play" command. I saved the result.

Now this seems to have worked, everywhere EXCEPT in the File Types dialogue, which still shows the WMP icon next to the type, in its list. Select and open that entry and the icon's correct. Just not in the Registered File Types list. I checked the registry again, and Defaulticon is pointing where I expected.

That's not a problem to just have it in the type list, and I can easily live with that, but it sure is strange. I agree, there must be some other cache, likely more than one, I think, that Explorer uses separately from everything else, and obviously not consistently or this would not happen. Explorer must be reading the file list icons from one cache, the actual filetype editing icons from another. And maybe the display icons from another?

Why would Microsoft do that??? It seems a lot of extra effort to no purpose. It must have been a legacy from something, that was easier to keep than rewrite, I guess.

I hadn't thought about the SP issue, but there were so many other changes that this is almost certainly right.

One way or another, this can be worked around, mostly. so let me see if I can figure out how to mark this resolved. Thanks again

 

I would like to half-reopen this issue. Hey, if TCP can do half-open connections, so can I.

Really, really, truly weird, this:

.avi extension shows the VLC icon in Windows Explorer.

.AVI extension shows the WMP icon.

Rename .AVI to .avi, and you get the VLC icon.

Yet, as far as I can determine, file types under Folder options is completely case-insensitive and shows all types in uppercase.

We have not gotten to the bottom of this yet! Still, it's XP, and there's no evidence that Win7 behaves this way. Wouldn't hurt to be on the lookout for it, just in case this craziness survived.