Restoring lost icons on Windows 7 Task Bar

For the last few days I’ve been annoyed that some of my application icons have been ‘lost’, reverting to some default system icon.

This was particularily prevalent for applications pinned to the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Most detail I found involves rebooting the computer, but I tried a slightly different approach just now and it has worked fine, without the need for rebooting. My applications icons are now restored 🙂

To restore the application icons using the same process, do the following:

1. Press and Hold the “Window Key” and press “R” (and then release both!)
2. type “cmd” and press “Enter”
3. type “taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F” [ Warning, may cause problems although it was fine for me. Also, if you are not worried about rebooting your system, you may skip this step and reboot after step 6 instead ]
4. type “del /a %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db“
5. type “explorer.exe“
6. type “exit“

You’re icons should now be restored. If anything goes wrong – and it hasn’t for me – then just reboot.

You can press “CTRL_ALT_DEL” to get a task manager, and from there you can either reboot, or again try to run explorer.exe