How to Fix Blank or White Shortcut Icons on Desktop

[fumble]

Once in a while, the shortcut icons on the Windows desktop may suddenly been changed or became blank or ‘white paper’ icon, where supposedly the icons should be colorful and customized in style and color. It’s as if the icon for the shortcut has been removed or unassigned, and been replaced with default blank icon in white.

The bug happens whenever there is corruption in icon cache database. For example, in Windows 7 pre-RC release, a network connection or broadband connection shortcut’s icon placed on desktop by user manually will go haywire and turn into blank default icon if there is another third-party program places an icon on desktop later.

In order to fix the problem where shortcut icons turn to blank icon, try to refresh or rebuild the cache database for icons. There are many system management software utilities that may reset the icon cache db automatically, but here’s how to reset the icon cache db manually.

To refresh and reset the icons cache, go to the following folder:

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\

To see the hidden AppData folder, go to Organize -> Folder and Search Options -> View tab, and select Show hidden files, folders and drives, and uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended).

Once inside the folder, delete IconCache.db. Create a new file named IconCache.db, and set it to Read Only attribute in Properties (if the file is not read only, the cache won’t be reset). Then restart the computer. Remove the Read Only attribute of IconCache.db file, and the icons cache will be refreshed. The step will restore the desktop shortcut icons to their lawfully icons.

Source: mydigitallife

[Spykar]

Just a short post for any of you that encounter the same issue I just did. I booted up this morning (Ubuntu Linux 8.04 - Hardy) and logged in, no problem. But my desktop background image (the wallpaper) had disappeared, along with my desktop icons. Also, the desktop background was all black. Rebooting did not fix the issue.

At first I thought it might be the nVidia drivers, but that was not correct because everything else worked (looked) fine. I did notice that if I right clicked on the desktop, nothing happened - No menu, no pop-up. If I selected System -> Preferences -> Appearance and then the Background tab, I was able to add and select several backgrounds but they did not display on the desktop (it remained back).

The issue turned out to be with Gnome/Nautilus (not Ubuntu/Linux). I began to realize this when I stumbled into this thread: Gnome desktop icon disappeared. In general that thread suggested restarting Gnome and perhaps restoring the a backup of the Gnome session file (I didn't have a backup of that and restarting the system did not work). The gem was one of the last comments that referred to Nautilus . I didn't think Nautilus would be the fix here - but it was!

On a lark, I decided to restart Nautilus with the following command in a terminal:

killall nautilus

For those not familiar with the above command, you may find this link helpful: Linux/Unix Command: killall. Suddenly my desktop wallpaper was back, as were my icons!

So... for any of you experiencing the same issue, hopefully this quick fix will save you hours of surfing or otherwise searching for a fix.

Cheers!

Source: ubuntulinuxhelp.com