Solved Program Icon/Thumbnail Blank.

Hello Win11 forum lads and lasses. I keep having this strange issue with some icons/thumbnails, I'll be honest I'm not entirely sure which is which since this issue has been perplexing me. Out of complete random, certain programs icons/thumbnails, and their shortcuts go blank/white. I've spent an hour trying to figure this out. I have used disk cleanup to clear the thumbnail cache, and I have deleted the Iconcache.db file in Appdata/Local, restarted explorer a few times for good measure, and restarted my PC as well. Nothing has been able to bring these Icons back, except for reinstalling the program.

Notepad++ also had this same issue, but using Revo to uninstall it and then reinstalling it, the icon came back. When I click on one of these programs in explorer the Icon shows in the details pane, they also show up as normal in my taskbar, and the default win11 start menu. But I am using Startallback, so it pulls the icon/thumbnail straight from its install folder, which of course makes all the affected icons in my start menu programs list blank.

There is 4 more programs I would need to manually uninstall and reinstall, there has to be an easier way to fix this and an answer as to why this is happening. As after reinstalling everything and not knowing what caused it, it could just happen again. Does anyone have a clue whats going on, and how to fix it?

attatched photos of the startmenu shortcuts, and an example of one of the programs in its install directory.

hHi Sam


For what it’s worth…

• Open search on your PC and type CMD, right click on CMD and “Open as admin”
• Click on the following command so it copies to your clipboard and paste it into the CMD window:

DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

• Press enter and be patient.
• Reboot your PC when finished.

After reboot:

• Open search on your PC, type CMD.
• Right click on CMD and “Open as admin”
• Click on the following command so it copies to your clipboard and paste it into the CMD window:

SFC /scannow

• Press enter and be patient.

Also, Sam.

Take a look at this tutorial. I read what you did but there are also comments in the thread, something might pop out.

I find that explorer sometimes loses it's marbles with icons and holding the control key and mouse scroll wheel up and down to cycle a few views makes it re-think.

antspants said:

hHi Sam


For what it’s worth…

• Open search on your PC and type CMD, right click on CMD and “Open as admin”
• Click on the following command so it copies to your clipboard and paste it into the CMD window:

DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

• Press enter and be patient.
• Reboot your PC when finished.

After reboot:

• Open search on your PC, type CMD.
• Right click on CMD and “Open as admin”
• Click on the following command so it copies to your clipboard and paste it into the CMD window:

SFC /scannow

• Press enter and be patient.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately neither the System File Checker or Image Management commands worked, no issues found with either. I have been skimming through that other post, and will keep doing so, but haven't found anything yet.
not sure if this helps narrow it down at all but it seems to be isolated to windows explorer. the icons for the .exe's shows up normally in everything.

Rollback_Jockey said:

I find that explorer sometimes loses it's marbles with icons and holding the control key and mouse scroll wheel up and down to cycle a few views makes it re-think.

Click to expand...

was worth a shot, lol. but no cigar.

@Brink the .BAT file worked!
If you haven't popped into this thread yet, thank you profusely, I am going mad with windows and all its "quirks"

for some reason running the command myself said that "/Q" was not a valid parameter.
but running the batch file worked perfectly. Saved for hopefully unnecessary future usage, but glad to have it.

marking thread solved, but the question still remains. Why is this happening in the first place? had this happen to an old install a couple weeks back too. If anyone knows an answer, I would be greatly appreciative.

samhainmitch said:

the .BAT file worked!

Click to expand...

What bat file

antspants said:

What bat file

Click to expand...

samhainmitch said:

Rebuild Icon Cache in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to rebuild the icon cache to clear and reset it for your account in Windows 10 and Windows 11. The icons that display for files in Windows are saved in an icon cache so they can be displayed quickly instead of having to manually scan and slowly load them each...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

Thanks, Sam.

Asked to be clear incase anyone found your problem in a Google etc search. They’ll understand the fix.

Hi,
I have a more recent other cause for this, specifically in the start-bar, for anyone more recently hunting this problem.
No amount of icon cache deleting/rebuilding helped, even running through Shawn Brink's fix (thanks btw). Also updated my Intel graphics drivers.

For years I've been running my display at 3840 x 2160, using scale=125% in display settings, on Windows 10, now on Windows 11. Just for the last week or so, 7 icons recently have been blank placeholders in the start bar.
Ultimately, I changed the scaling from 125% to 150%, and suddenly all icons were displayed.
Changed to 100%: still all icons displayed.
Back to 125%: nearly all icons displayed now - one (Phone Link) still does not.
Back to 150%: all icons displayed.
Reboot on 125%: 7 blank icons again.
Flip to 150% and back to 125%: nearly all icons displayed - one (Phone Link) still does not.
150% is the "recommended" setting for me, but I'll stick with 125% for now, just flip the scaling away and back after a reboot.
Hope this helps someone, and hope this starts working properly again soonish...