Win 98 desktop icon problem

[Harry Tuttle]

Ok, hopefully there's someone out there who can help me. I have a problem where after running a bunch of programs, whether it be MSPaint, PSP 8.0, Civ 2, my icons get all messed up. Any idea what's causing this? How do I fix this permanently? And no, I wish to keep Windows 98 on this machine...

For example the Christmas Card List is an Excel file...

[snoopy369]

Hmm, is it just excel files, or are other files changing also?

[Harry Tuttle]

Pretty much everything. Sometimes every single file (not shortcut mind you) switches icons.

[snoopy369]

Do they always change to the same icon? (IE does a .xls file always change to a batch file icon?)

[snoopy369]

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-130 - try their solution, I'm not sure it will fix the problem permanently as I'm not sure what's causing the problem.

It might be helpful to try and identify if one specific program is causing the corruption?

[snoopy369]

Ahhh... it looks like this might be the fix you need

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q132668/

Windows apparently has a small maximum size of its icon cache, and that means that it can become corrupt easily.

[snoopy369]

This btw seems to be the specific correction needed, amongst the large list they give you:

• Using Registry Editor, add the Max Cached Icons string value with a value data of 2000 to the following registry key, and then restart your computer:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer
If the icons are still incorrect, delete the ShellIconCache file. The Max Cached Icons value data range is between 100 and 4096. The default value is 500.

[Harry Tuttle]

Cool! Thanks Snoopy. I will try that.

[Thorn]

God I thought I was the only one that still used that thing.......... I have it for playing old dos games that emus and the like don't play flawlessly..... but I use XP now for everything else.