Missing icons with *some* EXE files

[stalks]

Hello there,

Some installed programs are showing the default 'no association' icon instead of their own embedded icon.

I have reinstalled a couple of times and it has been different programs that display this program each time.

For example, the desktop icon of one affected program: (trueimage.exe)

If I navigate to the installation directory of this program, I can confirm that the icon is fubar'd:

However, what is totally bizarre... if I rename the EXE, the icon works!

Humph. Frustrating.

I have tried deleting my %userprofile%\AppData\Local\iconcache.db and rebooting.

Any ideas?

[<SparTacuS>]

I havn't noticed this behaviour but in previous Windows versions there were various tricks/methods to force a rebuild of the icon cache. I suspect that may work here if you can figure which one is appropriate for 7.

You could try;

Move icon-less shortcuts to Recycle Bin, then restore them.

In desktop settings, change icon size, then set back to normal.

I would not reccomend trying any of the reg file type fixes (unless you're feeling very brave)

But I can tell you that I have the XP version of TweakUI installed on 7 (for several useful tweaks and applets) and that includes an option to rebuild this cache.

[stalks]

Wahey!

I changed to 16-bit color .. and the icon appeared. Great. However, the Aero theme is disabled at this color-depth. So I returned to 32-bit color and the icons go back to 'non-association' icons

So, I changed the color-depth to 16-bit again, deleted the icon cache again. Then ran the Aero compatibility troubleshooter, which re-enabled the 32-bit color depth, but the icon is fixed!

Excellent

Edit: Just to be complete, in case someone else finds this post hoping for a fix, I did do one other thing.

In the registry I had the following entry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\20F0FC333CA54974991575001F62DDA2]

"958E0E1DD64F80744AD1DE090C1C28A2"="C?\\Program Files (x86)\\Acronis\\TrueImageHome\\TrueImage.exe"

Notice the '?' instead of a colon ':'. I adjusted that entry to read C:\.

I don't know if this helped fix my icons, but just to be complete I thought I'd mention it.

Edited October 2, 2009 by stalks