All .EXE icons gone AWOL

Hi all,

I booted up my PC this morning (XP Pro SP2) and all my .exe icons are showing the same icon. I have tried rebooting to no avail.

I have tried TweakUI and done a Rebuild icons but nothing seems to work.

Any help/advice here is much appreciated. I'm a fairly advanced computer technican but this has me stumped.

How does XP know what icon from the EXE file to display ? Is there some service that performs this ? Is there some sort of "cache" of icons that needs to be deleted ?

I've searched Google and tried a heap of things but nothing seems to work.

Thanks in advance.

Andy

Any shell enhancements or replacements been used? i.e. Aston, Style XP, window Blinds etc?

Hi Rik, I did have WB, but it did not "appear" to coincide with WB's uninstall, although I maybe wrong as I normally have the Laptop in Hibernate and does not reboot often.

Any thoughts ?

I assume System restore has been attempted?

Yep tried that as well :(. It's very odd. All other Icons still have their correct associations, it's only the .EXE ones.

Sorry to be asking the obvious stuff but antivirus/spyware scans run?

No problems with the question, makes sure I have not missed anything obvious,

I have Adaware and scan it once a week, no problems, and have Ad-Watch installed for realtime protection. Also running McFee Enterprise edition (its a work laptop) and Zone Alarm 5. It a pretty secure little baby.

I've also run sfc /scannow which reports no problems as well...

All very strange.

what about reapplying sp2.

Here is a screen grab to show what I mean

How can you re-apply SP2 ? Sorry not tried that but willing to try anything :)

Do you have the service pack on cd or did you get it from thru Windows Update?

Downloaded through Windows Update, but had this for a while before the Icons went AWOL

it appears the icons you now have are the ones windows uses for unknown file types.

I may be wrong but this appears to be from what i see.

the actuall icon for the exe is stored in the exe itself

goto an exe file and right click and sent to desktop(create shortcut)

on the desktop, right click select properties and choose change icon.

the icon should be directed at the directory where the file is and should be the exe you created the shortcut for.

if it is not the file you should point to the file and see if you get the proper icon

this may give someone an idea if it works