Rebuild icon cache in Windows XP

Sometimes the icon cache in Windows becomes corrupt and you see wrong icons for different file types. One way to solve the issue is to restart the computer, but you can also rebuild the icons cache without restarting the computer. Here is how :

Update: Now you can use our Windows Icon Cache Refresher program to automatically re-build the icons cache at a single mouse click.

  1. Press the keyboard combination Windows logo key + R to bring up the Run dialog.
  2. Type cmd and press Enter to open the command prompt window.
  3. In the command prompt window, type the following commands pressing Enter after each line :
    taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
    attrib -H “%userprofile%Local SettingsApplication DataIconCache.db”
    del “%userprofile%Local SettingsApplication DataIconCache.db”
    explorer.exe

  4. This would restart the Windows Explorer and rebuild the icons cache as required.

You can also put all these commands into a command script, so you can run it by just double clicking on it.