Force rebuild icons cache in Windows Vista

Sometimes Windows’ icon cache gets corrupted and you see one mixed up icons in Windows Explorer for different kind of files. The icon cache can be rebuilt using the following process.

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

  1. Start an elevated command prompt. To see how look : how to open an elevated command prompt in Windows Vista.
  2. In the elevated command prompt, type the following commands and press Enter after each command :
    cd /d %userprofile%AppDataLocal
    attrib -h iconcache.db
    taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
    del iconcache.db
    start %windir%explorer.exe

Rebuilding icon cache in Windows Vista

This would close the Windows Explorer, delete the icon cache and again restart the Windows explorer. When Windows Explorer restarts, icon cache would be rebuilt.

This script does what you do manually in the previous method. This script would close the Windows Explorer, delete the icon cache and again restart the Windows explorer. If you are not comfortable with typing all those commands you can download the ready made script from icon_cache_rebuild.zip. Extract the file on your desktop, right-click on the downloaded script file rebuild_icon_cache.cmd and select Run as administrator.

Rebuilding icon cache in Windows Vista using batch file

2 comments

  1. Your “update” refresher program does not appear to work in Vista home premium : it created an unending loop, one window asking permission to proceed and the other saying what the program will do.

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