The ghost of icons past, should I pray to Saint William? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Why do my shortcut icons get broken on Windows 7?

I am fortnightly (or an approximation thereof) visited by the ghosts of icons, long departed. These apparitions only reveal themselves momentarily after I've logged in then vanish. Returning from whence they came.

I've investigated their history and found no clues as to why they continue to haunt me. I sought out an exorcist but those I found were only qualified to expel spirits of humans and demons. Not one had any experience with digital poltergeists.

Perhaps praying to Saint William of Redmond will improve the Vista before me.

Dost thou agree?

Solution 1:

It's said that icons which die by violent deletions cannot pass on to the afterlife because they are not at peace. So instead they roam the desktop, haunting the living...

The only way to get rid of digital poltergeists is to appease your 32-bit apparitions by executing a sacrificial Perl script whilst reciting the last 24 digits of pi. Should you be unable to perform the aforementioned ritual, then I suggest you to smite User Profile Hive Cleanup Service (UPHClean).

I don't know if that's your problem, but without further details (what exactly are the icons of? documents? programs? temporary files? system files? did you search for them on your hard drive? check the All Users or Default desktop directory? etc.), it's hard to tell what the problem might be. But I hope you can resolve this issue so that those icons may finally pass on to that great recycling bin in the sky.

Solution 2:

Some applications update themselves automatically. Each time they update, they may end up adding back icons to your desktop. Apple applications are notorious for this, but there are many others as well.

What Icons specifically keep reappearing?

Solution 3:

So, you have Windows Vista, and these are probably icons on the desktop that appear momentarily after login and then disappear. And it only happens every 2 weeks or so. Is there anything in your start menu or some task that starts that might be causing this? I would think something that is trying and failing to completely start might be at fault, but that should happen on every startup. So, perhaps something that is starting, and trying to do a periodic update is at fault. Perhaps a registry cleanup will help.

As for praying to Saint William -- that will only work if you pay him well. If you don't pay the exorcist, your computer is likely to be repossessed!

Solution 4:

I want to forestall the ghost of icons from haunting my desktop, hence I prevent any icons from showing...

Utilize your hairy mouse and close any windows except for Windows, then get a menu on your desktop. From there you can use the astonishing "view" menu to finally un-"show desktop icons"!

May this purple arrow guide you there...

Solution 5:

Delete your icon cache file, generally located at: C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\iconcache.db

Then switch your display to 16-bit color and then back to 32-bit. This rebuilds your your icon cache. That is, for each file type, the OS will extract the associated icon data from the appropriate program or library, rather than just using the icon it used last time.