Repairing or Rebuilding the Icons in Windows XP Using Tweak UI
One of our readers wrote to tell that the registry edit to change the open folder icon did not work in their Windows XP system, even after several reboots. Usually the shell icons refresh automatically after a restart, and if that does not happen, we can force an icon refresh using Microsoft’s Tweak UI PowerToy for Windows XP. That indeed fixed the problem on that occasion.
Rebuilding the icons in Windows XP
Rebuilding the icons causes the desktop icons to lose their custom positions. (Tip: Prior to repairing the icons, you can save the custom icon positions using the layout.dll shell extension. Later, the saved setting can be restored. For more information, see article Save and Restore Desktop icon layout.)
1. Download the Tweak UI PowerToy and install it.
2. Run Tweak UI using the shortcut in Start, All Programs.
3. Click Repair in the left pane
4. With Rebuild Icons option selected in drop-down, click Repair Now
5. Click OK.
Editor’s Note: To refresh the icons in Windows Vista, read article Fix Incorrect icon shown for a file type in Windows Vista. If a shell folder in your Windows XP system is showing incorrect icon even after repairing using Tweak UI, get the ShellIconFix tool.
Copyright © 2008 Ramesh Srinivasan. All rights reserved.
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August 21st, 2008 at 9:14 am
The solution was found. You must make the folder either readonly or a system folder with attrib (using Explorer does not work). This can be done with attrib +r or attrib +s from the command line.
August 21st, 2008 at 7:57 am
Is there a way to do this manually? Using RegMon I can see the only registry key that TweakUI changes is “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\My Videos” to the folder that it should be. Just setting this doesn’t work. Additionally, putting the correct desktop.ini file in the folder does nothing either. Once the folder is customized in anyway (like any action that would create a desktop.ini) however putting the correct desktop.ini does work. This is probably due to it being stored on the internal Explorer’s list of customized folders. It seems that once a folder is on this list you can customize it all you want manually. But how do you get it on the list manually?