What the.. Black Square Icons?! HELP! - Tech Support Forums

voogru · December 9th, 2001, 08:12 PM

Ok, was playing in counter0strike and everything suddenly locked up (always happens in cs prolly a win2k problem) anyways i hit hte power button on to see on my next boot this

i asked for a friend to send me there win2k explorer.exe and there both the same siz in bytes so my explorer.exe is fine. it only seems to be doing this to 16x16 icons the 32x32 icons are fine. why is it doing this and how can i fix it? this is very annoying and i tried a scandisk with no luck.

thanks

excuse the terrible quality i just want people to see sorta what i see

strangerstill · December 9th, 2001, 08:17 PM

Probably you need to flush/repair your icon cache.

MicroAngelo can do this, also it's on the Repair tab in TweakUI

**EvilRick** · December 9th, 2001, 08:19 PM

There is a file in your C:\WINNT directory called "ShellIconCache". It is a hidden system file. You need to delete it. Empty the recycle bin and reboot. It should fix itself once you do this.

It's basically a cached file of all your icons. Sometimes it gets corrupt and displays black squares.

You can also use "TweakUI" from M$ and use the repair funcion in it. It does the same thing, except with the click of a button.

voogru · December 9th, 2001, 08:21 PM

that did the trick, thanks!

voogru · December 10th, 2001, 05:31 PM

Hmm, the icons went all black on the next boot rebuilding them did fix it but on my next logon wy user info was corrupt. fired up disk defrag and i got a pretty ugly picture (i think)

Xaotic · December 10th, 2001, 09:11 PM

For Windows, that looks fairly normal. The OS isn't really efficient in putting data on the disk. I've seen much worse. The kind where it was so bad diskkeeper wouldn't touch it. Had to use the MS defrag a couple of times before diskkeeper would handle it.

AnakiMana · December 10th, 2001, 09:17 PM

*LOL*

Yikes, voogru! You might wanna defrag it every few weeks. It doesn't take long if you do it often. I bet you're seeing a performance increase now, huh?

voogru · December 10th, 2001, 10:41 PM

Yep, pretty good increas, funny only a week or two ago it was just fine. got all fragmented fast. must have been playing too much quake3 and obviously not beating anyone.

Tomteriffic · December 12th, 2001, 03:35 PM

I used to get the black icons thing, as well as some other oddities with text and things like checkboxes. Solution turned out to be twofold. For one I had the system and vidcard pretty seriously overclocked, but backing it down did not solve the issues entirely.

Long story short, the problem was the number of fonts I had on the machine (well over 1000) and for some reason that was setting the machine nutz. This was in Win 98Se, but...