Description: This article shows the steps required rebuild the desktop icon cache in Windows. This may be helpful if incorrect icons are being displayed or if a blank icon appears when the icon was displaying fine previously.

1. Open an Elevated Command Prompt window.
   

   Instructions on how to do this in Windows 7 can be found here

   Instructions on how to do this in Windows 8 can be found here

   

2. Type in the following commands, pressing Enter on the keyboard after each line. The last command will restart the computer so make sure to have any work saved before entering the commands.

taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
DEL IconCache.db /a
shutdown /r

3. After the computer restarts, the icon cache will be rebuilt and the icons should return back to normal.