This one is a riot and frankly had me stumped longer than I care to admit. I had a user call in saying their desktop icons had all turned white/blank.
It started with one user, then another, and then that number grew to six. The common denominator was that each of these users had been recently upgraded from Windows 7 pro to 10 pro. Which, BTW you can still do for FREE. (Disclaimer on that, I don’t know how long that upgrade link will be good for. Microsoft had announced it would be ending, but it clearly hasn’t. Also, make sure you update your chipset and video drivers afterwards. Dual monitors don’t like to work with the Windows 7 drivers. Dell just had a bunch of updates between December and February 2019)
I digress. Anyway, these people had all been updated at different points in the past few weeks, but the icon issue happened to them all in a 48 hour time frame. Also, it was affecting any user that logged onto the affected machine. Gotta be an update right? We attempted rolling back a cumulative update on Feb 11th for 1809, this did not work. Here are some of the other things I attempted that did not work; however, in different instances they make work for you:
- Clear the icon cache. First- in file explorer, make sure you change the view to show hidden folders.
- C:/users/%user%/appdata/local/ and find the IconCache.db. Permanently delete. Go into task manager (right click toolbar and select task manager) in processes towards the bottom, select file explorer- right click and restart the process.
- If that doesn’t work you can attempt this: windows + r key and type ie4uinit.exe -show
- You can try system file checker but that didn’t work for me either.
So where does that leave me thinking? Registry. It’s always the registry. After doing some Google Kung Fu, I found the culprit. I found another article that said Palo Alto Traps caused the change in the key, but I don’t buy it. If that had been the case, all of my users would have been affected. Anyway, here’s what you’ll need to do.
- Open up run command, Windows key + R
- Type in regedit
- BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY FIRST!
- Navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile/shellex\IconHandler change the default to 00021401-0000-0000-C000-000000000046
Now, the original article I found this beautiful nugget of information in, recommended deleting and rebuilding the icon cache after this change, but it works fine without it. You will need to restart the file explorer process again afterwards, or reboot. Your choice. For mass deployment, we created a packaged in PDQ deploy (that’s what we use. I love it). Once I’m back at work Tuesday, I’ll grab the details of the package and post them here.
This was a maddening event, like I said it took me longer than I care to admit to figure out, but I did find the answer and I was pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading!
*Edit*
For mass deployment, export the registry file for that key. Our environment uses pdq deploy and here is the package details.
Step 1 install file, here insert the path to the exported registry file
Run the following command to merge the registry
Merge registry. Command line regedit.exe /s “name of exported reg file”
Next powershell to restart the file explorer for the change to take affect
Stop-Process -ProcessName explorer -Force
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