Hello there. I haven't posted here in awhile, but I want to talk about something I encounter with my Windows XP Pro desktop.

Every once in awhile, after doing something memory intensive like web browsing or playing games, something happens to the desktop icons when I open up a folder in Explorer. The icons on the desktop suddenly flash and reappear, but all the icons display a generic application icon (a piece of paper with a program manager window on it) and the icons slowly revert back to their proper icon styles. (Mozilla Firefox logo, Adobe Reader logo, etc)

What causes this to happen? Does it somehow reload the icon cache or something?

Here are my system specifications

Intel Pentium III 1ghz

512mb RAM

160GB Hard Disk

ATI Radeon 9200 Graphics Card

Windows XP Professional

i dont know what is causing it, but if you install Microsoft's TweakUI utility, you can use the "Reapair Icons" command to refresh all icons used by your system. more info on the link below.

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/repair-i...using-tweak-ui/

You don't have the fastest of computer, apparently some processes are running in the background and taking resources. Check your computer for malware and uninstall unneeded programs that autostart. Also check if your C: partition is not getting full or too fragmented.

Well, I did defragment the disk and run Spybot, but the issue still occurs from time to time. I am thinking of getting a RAM upgrade possibly beefing it up to 768mb, or at least 1gb RAM (if my motherboard supports it) and it should help out. Other than that, Windows XP runs very well on my hardware.

I did do a reinstall because of an unrelated issue, and though the icon reloading still happens, I am not planning on having many icons on my desktop anymore, and using the Start Menu for games and such so it should no longer be an issue.

What is the size of your Windows user profile? It should be under 1GB! You can check this by looking at the properties of c:\documents and settings\YOURPROFILENAME. Mine weighs in at ~400-600MB last I checked.