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drewmorrisFlag for United States of America

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Any ideas how to change my Icons from Blank to default?

I am not sure how it happened but my icons all over my Vista PC are just blank Icons.
I tried System Restore to no avail.  I can do them one by one but its way too time consuming.  I was able to restore desktop.ini files and my actual desktop seems ok but when I click on Start->All Programs they are just a blank (or generic windows) icons.
I have attached a couple of screen shots. Its also like this in Start->Computer->C Drive
Any ideas?  
icons.JPG
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drewmorris
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Also, any ideas how to change my desktop shortcut icons back?
The original icon for this is ok but not the shortcut arrow.
icons3.JPG
icons4.JPG
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Thumbnails and live icons can sometimes get corrupted. In Windows XP, you needed to delete a hidden file called thumbs.db, and then redisplay of the folder with the thumbnail view enabled would regenerate this cache. In Windows Vista, there is no thumbs.db file; it has been replaced by others.  This is described here:

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1890

The relevant quotation:

The hidden file "thumbs.db" introduced in previous Windows versions which has been of such interest to investigators over the past few years has also undergone a significant change. In fact this file has been replaced by a number of "thumbcache_xxx.db" files which are now located within a user's profile at

\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Another change to be aware of is that the Disk Cleanup Wizard included with Vista may be used to delete these thumbnails. [Note: in some cases Microsoft now refers to thumbnails as "icons" or "live icons".]
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TK-77
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LeeTutor: I am not sure what you want me to do, in XP you say to delete thumbs.db, in Vista and I supposed to delete all of the thumbcache_xxx.db files?  If so, i did but it didn't do any thing.

TK-77:  thanks! That worked for my desktop but my "Computer" still shows the blank icons. Is there somewhere else I need to do the deleting?
I tried your solution to the location LeeTutor mentioned but still no luck.
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OK, this is odd, when I bring up Computer and show the icons on the left they are blank but on the right they are correct
icons7.JPG
"Another change to be aware of is that the Disk Cleanup Wizard included with Vista may be used to delete these thumbnails. [Note: in some cases Microsoft now refers to thumbnails as "icons" or "live icons".] "
I am pretty sure that is what caused it. I do remember running the Disk Cleanup Wizard
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Both TK-77 and LeeTutor were 100% correct I just needed to reboot to have the cache file rebuilt.  Thank you BOTH!!!!