[Resolved] Restoring file type default icons. Please Help!

This Microsoft Knowledgebase article: Icons Randomly Change to Different Icons offers information, tips, and links you might find helpful.

You might wanna try ActiveIcons[/i] or RefreshEm; both are freeware. Microsoft's Tweak UI 1.33[/i][/b] also has icon manipulation/restoral capability. Though it is a Microsoft application, Tweak UI is "Unsupported", meaning any help or support for it is available only through forums and newsgroups. As with any application, before using any of these, consult the relevant documentation and be sure the application will do what you want it too, and that you know what you're doing and how to do it before doing it.


And now you know why its always a good idea to back up anything you're thinking of changing before you go changing it

Ahh! Thank you so so much!! The ActiveIcons tool is exactly what I need, since I don't feel comfortable editing registry keys, plus it seems a little dangerous for a person like me to do, haha.

I have a question though, what would happen if I were to enter the url IconPhile displayed for the similar icons (for example, entering c:\progra~1\window~1\wmplayer.exe,-120 for the .mp3 icon)? And how is it that the icon file is a .exe program? I thought all icon files were either .ani or .ico files... Is it somehow embeded in the program, thus the number after the filename (8, -120)?

Thank you again, your help is very very much appreciated!

I'm really not familiar with IconPhile, or with ActiveIcons or RefreshEm, for that matter, though I've read good reports about the latter 2. The Tweak UI/Powertoys (which is more or less Teak UI for XP) stuff I am pretty familiar with, and find quite useful. Anyhow, I figure you're prolly on the right track thinking the number suffixes appended to the .exe filename are an artifact of that particular program ... likely having to do with how the prograsm handles invoking a particular application through a click on the modird icon - but thats just a guess. I know this sounds lazy, but I'd hafta look into it to say for sure, and I'm just not up for doing that at the moment. I'm good at lazy.

I tried both ActiveIcons and RefreshEm, and none of the two worked. For ActiveIcons, I tried 3 times, each using different methods (manual restore, repair icon cache, rebuild icon cache)

I just downloaded Tweak UI, the repair icons page says this:



That is not exactly what's happening on my computer.

Do you think I should delete the .ico files so the filetypes using them will have a missing icon and then use the rebuild icon cache function from ActiveIcons?

Or maybe I should reinstall WMP and IE, and when it's installed again, the regular icons will overwrite the icons I currently have? This happened once when I installed MusicMatch Jukebox and all the media files' icons changed to the jukebox ones. Probably it'll work in this situation too??

Uninstalling/re-installing the affected apps should restore their default icons. I'd try that first. Lemme know what happens.

Wow, it worked! The media and .gif files' icons are back to normal

Although, when I was installing both windows media player and internet explorer, Microsoft AntiSpyware gave me popup's saying it gave permission for something called ADVPACK to be installed on my registry. There was another one with the same thing except it only popped up during IE installation and the changed allowed was "related.htm" being installed.

Anyways, that's what happened. I'm glad my icons are back to normal , thank you for all the help!

Ah oops, sorry, I forgot one thing. My .log files still have the custom icon...even though I never changed the icon for it Here's a screencap from IconPhile



Could you please tell me what the default icon for .log files are? I'm so clueless...I don't think I've even seen a .log file before. Does it look like the .inf icon or does it look like the .txt icon? Thanks again

.log files are generally text files - I'd expect to see .log files with the icon of the text editor you've registered to view them. Mine's Notepad.

ADVPAK and that particular instance of related.htm are legitimate Microsoft components - nothing to worry about, as Microsoft Antispyware determined and reported.

OK, thanks. I changed the .log files back. When I opened IconPhile just 5 minutes ago, I could've smacked my self on the head. In options, there was a button called "restore Win icons" I changed the mp3 icon just to see if it works...it didn't work. I had to reinstall WMP again. But after all the installing everything's finally back to normal =)

I wasn't worried about the related.html thing, but ADVPAK looks a little weird...I'm like that when I see anything with the word AD. All thanks to ABI... haha, I'm still happy from getting rid of that =D

Thanks timberlandko!

Yer weccum. Glad we could help. Looks like we can mark this one Resolved.