Vista - Thumbnails missing

Hi, I having this problem with thumbnails in vista not showing up for some time now. I have basically read all the threads I could and still found no solution. I believe this all started when I first installed CCleaner which probably erased my thumbnail cache but, on the other hand, when I open a folder with some images, they thumbnails show up for, say, a second and then quickly regenerate to the default image, which could mean the cache is still there.
I've tried the folder options, performance settings, registry edit... and still no impact.
I run a home premium 32b.
Thank you in advance

(I'm not sure this is the right forum section I should be posting this thread to)

Hello Antonio,

CCleaner would only clear the thumbnail cache to where they would have to be reloaded again, but it wouldn't prevent the thumbnails from displaying though.

Have you changed your default image viewer from "Windows Photo Gallery" to something else instead?

Check the item in this tutorial and the related links in it to see if it may be able to help you any more to.

Thumbnails in Windows Explorer

Hope this helps,
Shawn

First it was Windows Photo Gallery, but then to see if there would be any results I turned Microsoft Picture Manager into the default viewer, but still nothing happened.
I have been redoing the suggestions from that thread and none seemed to work, except for the group policy editor which I can't access...

and thank you Shawn for your response

Antonio,

All of the methods affect the same thing as in the Group Policy method. They are just different ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Check to make sure that Windows Photo Gallery is set as the default program with all of it's associations set to it.

Are you using a Windows Aero color scheme?

I set the Windows Photo Gallery as the default program for all its supported extensions, and I got to see the usual landscape icon. As for the color scheme, I'm using the Windows Vista Basic, should I try to set it differently?

It should work in that color scheme.

As a test, try the following to see if they can help:

1. Thumbnail Cache
2. Icon Cache - Rebuild
3. Toggle thumbnails off and on to see if it can reset.
4. Check to make sure that the color depth is set to 32-bit.
5. Run a sfc /scannow command to see if that can find and fix any bad system files that may be the cause.
6. If the above still does not help, then you can do a System Restore using a restore point dated before this problem.

I did all that you said but the icons still show up instead of thumbnails, except for the System Restore which I was unable to access due to an "unexpected error" (0x8007007B)...another problem

Antonia,

It's a bit more drastic, but you could do a repair (upgrade) install.

I don't own a copy of vista because this computer is part from a governmental scholar project which distributed pc's at low prices. I'm giving up this thumbnails missing situation till some easy way of undoing it comes along, which will probably take some time
Thanks anyway, Shawn

Ok Antonio. Does is come with some form of a recovery option to restore Vista back to factory defaults? Most computers will have at least this in the form of a recovery partition, recovery disks, or both.