![]() If you attempt to delete the iconcache files right within AB Commander or Windows Explorer, Windows will refuse to delete some of them, because the files would still be in use by AB Commander or Explorer! That's right, Windows cannot delete the files that are in use. If you need to repair a corrupted thumbnail of an image file, you need to delete the thumbcache files. To force Windows to rebuild its icon cache, you need to delete all the iconcache files that appear in this folder, and that should repair any damaged icons that you see on your Windows 8/10/11 desktop. You don't have to be a computer genius to figure out that these files are used by Windows to keep the thumbnail cache of the image files. That's the files where Windows 8+ store the icon cache! If you scroll down, you should see another group of files with names starting with thumbcache: In that folder, you should find quite a few files which names begin with iconcache, such as: (Again, replace with the actual login name of your user account, which is Admin in our example.) While in the AppData\Local folder, double-click on Microsoft, then on Windows, and finally on Explorer, to navigate to the following folder:Ĭ:\Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer This indicates that Windows 8/10/11 keeps the icon cache somewhere else.Īfter looking around a bit, we've solved the mystery. ![]() However, if you do this with Windows 8, 10, or 11, there is no effect on the icons, and if you had any wrong icons displayed on the desktop, they would still be wrong. Yes, the IconCache.db file is still there, as it was in Windows 7, Vista, and XP, but the difference is, Windows 8 (and Windows 11/10) no longer uses this file to store the icon cache! How do we know? Simple: under Windows 7 and earlier, if you delete this file as described in our previous article, Windows will rebuild it next time it needs to show the icons, and repair any damaged or missing icons. Let's take a look inside of the AppData\Local folder: there may be several sub-folders and files there, depending on which programs you have installed on your computer, but if you look closely, you should notice the IconCache.db file there: Without AB Commander, navigate to the folder C:\Users\AppData\Local, where must be replaced with the actual login name of your user account, which is Admin in our example. Press OK, and AB Commander will take you directly to the right folder. With AB Commander, you can use its Go to command (on the Folder menu) and select the Application Data (local) in the list: With that out of the way, let's navigate to the folder where Windows keeps the iconcache.db file. Don't worry, if you don't like these changes, you can always change them back when you are done. While you are changing the folder options, you may also want to clear the option "Hide extensions for known file types": seeing the file extensions should make it easier to recognize the files that we will encounter along the way. When the Folder Options window is displayed, select the View tab and enable the "Show hidden files, folders, and drives" option: Without AB Commander, open Windows Control Panel and choose the Folder Options command. To do that with AB Commander, choose Tools - Folder Options from the menu. (It's free for the first 30 days, you can always uninstall it later on if you find no other use for it.) You can certainly do the following without AB Commander, too.Īlso, if you have not done so already, you may need to enable the Windows option that makes the hidden files visible. If you want to follow along, you may want to install our AB Commander first. ![]() In this article, we explain what has changed and what needs to be done to repair the icon cache in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, 11, and future versions of Windows. That worked for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, but starting with Windows 8, Microsoft changed the rules of the game, and erasing the iconcache.db file to fix the corrupt or outdated icons no longer works. How to rebuild the icon cache and/or thumbnail cache in Windows 11 and 10īefore Windows 8, repairing the desktop icons was relatively easy: all you needed to do was to force Windows Explorer to rebuild the iconcache.db file, and that would fix the corrupt desktop icons almost magically.
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