PowerToy tweaks corrupted icons 
By Charles Miller

This week’s question from an Atención reader is “How do you fix all the desktop icons when their appearance is not correct?”

Actually, the reader asked, “What causes all the programs on the computer to get corrupted at the same time?” A little investigation showed that the programs themselves were not damaged at all. The icons and the programs they represent worked okay; only the icons’ appearance on the desktop was all munged up.

The familiar icons for Internet Explorer, My Computer, My Documents, Microsoft Word and others had been replaced with the same generic icon. Thankfully, this problem looks a whole lot worse than it really is!

To understand why all the different and unrelated icons could get messed up at the same time, it is necessary to understand just a little about how Microsoft Windows creates those icons on your desktop. To speed up performance, Windows XP caches the desktop icons to one file so that it needs look only one place for the desktop icons rather than search all over the hard disk for all those different icon files every time you start the computer. This system works well, it does speed up the computer, but there are a couple of things that can go wrong. The icon cache file can become corrupted, or you can add so many icons to your desktop that you outgrow the available size of the cache.

Often the icons on the desktop can be repaired by forcing Windows to reread all the cached icons. Go to the Windows Control Panel and double click on the “Display” icon. Click on the “Appearance” tab and click on [Advanced]. Under “Item” pull down the menu and select “Icon” then change the “Size” setting, for example from 35 to 36 (pixels). The number is completely unimportant; just change it by an increment of one or two in order to force Windows to refresh the icon cache. Click on [OK] then [Apply]. Now go back and put the size back where it was to begin with and click on [OK] and [Apply] again. Or, if you like the change you just made and want the icons permanently bigger or smaller, then forget about changing the number back to where you started.

If this fails to fix your broken icons, Microsoft makes a free utility by the name of TweakUI that might be the tool you need. Download Microsoft's free TweakUI PowerToy from Microsoft by pointing your Internet browser to “http://tinyurl.com/2meyw.”

TweakUI PowerToy is an extension to Windows offered by Microsoft. It adds several advanced functions to Windows, including the ability to fix the icons cache file. On the “Fix” menu in TweakUI, there are several other specific icons the utility can fix.

If that still fails, then you are probably going to need to edit the registry to correct the problem, and for most readers this means seeking professional assistance. For our expert readers: find the “MaxCachedIcons” key and increase the value by 1024 or multiple thereof.

If you do not care to do that, another option is to reduce the number of icons on your desktop. Fewer icons require less cache for storage.

Fortunately, this problem only affects icon appearance and not their functionality, so you can continue to use the computer even if the icons look strange.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ7@SMAguru.com