if anyone has a clue, the little yellow folder boxes to the left of the folders in explorer/my computer are now black, or if I drag an icon shortcut from my desktop to the task bar the icon becomes totally black so you can't tell what it is.

Anybody

edit-I reinstalled drivers, and erased the shellcon. Still black.

Hm, don't know what kind of machine you're on, but twice when I've had that sort of trouble it was caused by a display driver gone over to the evil side. In each case, reinstalling the same driver didn't help but installing the very latest did. Never was quite sure why it was like that but there it is.

One other time a similar thing occurred but vanished after a reboot. Never returned. Corrupt RAM or some other one-shot oddity I guess. Hope it's something simple like that. :-)

Meffy

matrox g550. Will try installing the latest drivers. Thanks for quick reply.

MY computer does this also! And I'm running a NVidia GeForce something or other, and the newest drivers didn't help...

ready for a stupid one. It says to uninstall the previous drivers first. Does that mean remove hardware, or do I go to a place in control panel for drivers? If I uninstall the drivers, how am I going to be able to see to re-install? You can see it's a miracle I get as much done as I do knowing so little about computers.

found it-it's add remove programs. Here goes.

if anyone has a clue, the little yellow folder boxes to the left of the folders in explorer/my computer are now black, or if I drag an icon shortcut from my desktop to the task bar the icon becomes totally black so you can't tell what it is.

This is usually a problem with the ShellIconCache -- at least, I've seen this before and there may be different solutions depending on the version of Windows. The following appears to remedy the situation in the past:

• Open Start Menu, Settings, Control Panel, then click the Display icon.
  
• Select the Appearance tab.
  
• Select the icon in the Item Box.
  
• Increase the icon unit by 1.
  
• Select Apply.
  
• Decrease the icon unit by 1.
  
• Select OK.
  
• Delete the file %systemroot%\ShellIconCache
  (Note: This file has a hidden attribute, so you may need to display hidden files in order to see it).
  
• Log off and log back on to see the correct icons.
  

There are discussions on this on the net, so do a google and you're bound to find others with the same predicament. Many of the solutions look very similar to the above, so try that first.

Good luck, and please report back if this helps at all...or not, as the case may be!

thanks so much for that long explanation. I've just re-installed the drivers and will now do what you said.

Michae

Hi Michael,

I had responded to a post like this back on June 11. Here is what I had to say about it then and now:

If you have problems with icons in general on your desktop then try deleting the hidden file C:\Windows\ShellIconCache then reboot (it will be recreated and repopulated automatically by Windows). This is a cache of all the icons encountered by the Windows explorer user-interface shell.

-Techead

Select the icon in the Item Box

W2K? Don't know which icon you are referring to.

Thanks

sounds great, but how do I do it? Delete a hidden file?

Thanks