How to restore original windows 7 icons for shortcuts

How to restore original windows 7 icons for shortcuts

It's frustrating trying to open a saved document or play a media file and realizing that the document will not open correctly or the application gives an error while trying to open it. Simply because the default icon of the application has changed.

To rebuild your icon cache:
  1. Close all programs
  2. Click Start, then type CMD into the Search programs and files window.
  3. Right click on the CMD program that is displayed above and select Run as administrator.
  4. Navigate to C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local. This can be accomplished with the command:CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local <enter>
  5. Delete the IconCache.db file that resides there. e.g. DEL IconCache.db /ah<enter>
  6. Close this command window and restart the computer.
If your icons do no immediately return after the restart, simply restart it agin. I've never had to restart more than once myself, but I've heard of others having to restart two or three times. This is most likely due to having programs and/or Explorer processes running before the first restart, e.g. not following step 1.

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