"Generic" icons - how to restore?

I'm having a problem with some of my document icons appearing as the "generic" icon rather than the program-specific icon that indicates what program created them.

This occurs for all of my MS Office documents and Acrobat Reader PDF files. It does not happen for MP3 files.

The problem started a couple days ago following a botched System Restore to fix another issue. SR froze for about an hour in the "Initializing" stage, at which point I did a hard reset.

Here's a rundown of what I've tried already. Nothing has worked.
1) Deleted iconcache.db from AppData/Local and restarted.
2) Restarted in safe mode and then in normal mode.
3) Changed the screen resolution to 16-bit and back to 32-bit.
4) Ran a few spyware scanners: Malwarebytes, Spybot, Adaware
5) Tried right-clicking on individual files and associating them with MS Word, Acrobat, etc.
6) Doing another system restore to "fix" the original aborted System Restore, but this one had to be aborted as well
7) Did plenty of Googling, which turned up nothing beyond the above fixes

Welcome to the Forum.

Hope that this excellent tutorial, written by our own Brink can help.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/117229-icon-cache-rebuild.html?ltr=I

Thanks but the two steps suggested in that tutorial correspond to (1) and (3) in my message - in other words, already attempted. Any other ideas?

There is system restore. If this just happend, go back a few days earlier. That should make it good again.

Hello rs913,
Try this, just to make sure your file system is in good order after the restore went wrong.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/66978-system-files-sfc-command.html

Also, take a look here and see if anything applies to your situation.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88790-how-harvest-restore-retain-icons-vista.html

Hope some of this may be of some use, good luck and post your results.

stoneys-nutz said:

Hello rs913,
Try this, just to make sure your file system is in good order after the restore went wrong.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/66978-system-files-sfc-command.html

Also, take a look here and see if anything applies to your situation.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88790-how-harvest-restore-retain-icons-vista.html

Hope some of this may be of some use, good luck and post your results.

Click to expand...

Any thoughts on the best way to use the SFC command: just scan, or scan and repair? Is there any risk of creating additional problems with the repair option?

As for the icons, I might just re-install Office since my problem is only with Office files and the above tutorial only contains steps I've already tried. But thanks.....

Use scan and repair. It only restores to the way it was when first installed. If you have any concerns make a system restore point first.