If icons in your Windows 10 File Explorer look strange or broken, your icon cache might have become corrupt. This issue is very common for all Windows versions. In this article we will see what to do to fix broken icons and reset the icon cache.

1. The icons are stored in a Windows Database file and are loaded from here instead of the directory where the icon is stored. This ensures that Windows is faster. In the tutorial below I will explain how you can reset the icon cache database file without a cmdlet or a third party application.
2. On Windows 10, those icons you see on files and apps are stored in the icon cache database to allow the operating system to display them quickly on the screen. The process of caching icons, instead of retrieving them from the source, helps to prevent your system from getting bogged down by the mere task of 'showing icons'.
3. Download over 763 icons of clear in SVG, PSD, PNG, EPS format or as webfonts. Flaticon, the largest database of free vector icons.

To show icons faster, Windows caches them into a file. This special file contains icons for many apps and file types, so File Explorer doesn't need to extract the icons for known file extensions and apps. This allows File Explorer to work faster, but it has an annoying side effect. If the cache ever gets corrupted, Windows displays wrong icons. Some files in File Explorer and the Desktop can stop showing the right icons or get a blank 'unknown file type' icon. Some shortcuts can display the incorrect icons. To fix this, you need to reset the icon cache.

To use the program, simply extract Thumbnail and Icon Cache Rebuilder for Windows 10 into any folder, click or double click on 'Thumbnail and Icon Cache Rebuilder.exe' to start the program. Then check either (or both) 'delete Icon cache' and 'Delete Thumbnail Cache', click 'Rebuild' and wait for Explorer to. The cache deletion will remove the following Microsoft Teams items from your Windows 10 PC; the web client cache, icons, thumbnails, local message history, your Microsoft Teams display images,.

Edit: there is a better way to reset the icon cache and fix broken icons. Read this article:

Unfortunately, there is no special button or option in Windows 10 to rebuild the icon cache. Despite this being a fairly common issue, Microsoft didn't provide any tool bundled with the operating system to fix it. To reset the icon cache in Windows 10, there are two methods available:

Option one. Delete the corrupted icon cache in Windows 10

1. The icon cache file is hidden in Windows so if you have set hidden and system files to not show, you will have to show them. To do this, open Control Panel.
2. Then, open Folder Options and go to the View tab. Select the option Show hidden files, folders and drives. Also uncheck the option Hide protected operating system files. Then click OK and close Control Panel.
   
3. Press the Win+R keys together on your keyboard to open the Run dialog.
4. In the Run dialog type %localappdata% and press Enter.
5. Your local app data folder (C:Users<your user name>AppDataLocal) will open. Locate the iconcache.db file. Delete this file.
   
6. Now restart the Explorer shell or log off and log on again.

You are done with the first method. If a logoff does not work, try restarting Windows after deleting Iconcache.db. However, your problem might be that the icon cache file on disk is not corrupted but Windows is still showing incorrect icons because it loaded the wrong icons in memory. In that case, try the next option.

Option two. Reset the in-memory icon cache in Windows 10 with a small freeware app

We will use a third party tool especially designed to refresh the shell icon cache.

1. Download Winaero Tweaker.
2. Run it and go to ToolsReset Icon Cache:
   
3. Now every time you want to refresh the icon cache, click the button 'Reset Icon Cache'.

That's it.

Reset Icon Cache Windows 10

Tell us in the comments which method worked for you or if you know of another way to fix corrupt icons. Note that despite these methods, your Windows 10 Start Menu might continue to not show some icons for desktop apps. This is a known problem with the Windows 10 Start Menu. On a number of systems, we have seen that the Start Menu shows blank/empty white icons for desktop shortcuts.

Reset Icon Cache

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