Windows users often complain about corrupted desktop and explorer icons. Like in Windows XP and Vista, Windows 7 icons also may also get corrupted when you try to install and uninstall third-party icon packs and transformation packs.
If for any reason, one or more Windows 7 icons are not showing correctly, you can repair by rebuilding the icon cache. To improve the performance, Windows caches all icons in IocnCache.db file and sometimes it gets corrupted, resulting in broken icons.
Icon cache is a hidden file located in the Local Folder. All you need to do is delete the IconCache.db file and restart your PC so that Windows creates a new IconCache.db file upon system restart.
This guide also works if Windows is showing custom icons even after uninstalling transformation packs and icon packs.
Rebuild Windows 7 icon cache
Complete the given below instructions to rebuild the icon cache in Windows:
Step 1: Open Windows Explorer (any folder/drive).
Step 2: As the IconCache is a hidden file, you need to enable “Show hidden files” option to see the same. To do this, head over to Tools > Folder Options, switch to View tab, and finally enable Show Hidden files, folders, and drives option.
Step 3: Now navigate to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local folder and then delete IconCache.db file. Here username is your user profile name.
Step 4: Reboot your computer to rebuild the icon cache.
Step 5: All icons must appear as they should now. From now onwards, make sure that you create a manual system restore point before attempting to install those fancy transformation packs and icons packs so that you can quickly revert to the default Windows look with a few mouse clicks.
And if you don’t want to manually delete icon cache and would rather prefer to use software for the job, we recommend you try out Icon Cache Rebuilder tool. Download, run the tool with admin rights, click the Rebuild button, and then click the Restart button to delete and rebuild the icon cache.
If you are a Windows 10 user, refer to our how to repair/rebuild the icon cache in Windows 10 guide.