§ ¶A bit of an unfortuate icon mixup

Windows caches icons in several places, one being the shell, and another being in VRAM by the display driver. Whenever any of these caches goofs up, the wrong icons show up. This is a particularly unfortunate mixup:

Looks like the browser war is escalating inside my computer....

Comments

Comments posted:

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Wait, you use Outlook Express?!

nine_tails - 07 06 08 - 23:04

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No. Take that back.

Phaeron - 07 06 08 - 23:12

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What is so bad on OE? :-)
And for large amount of email I use gmail anyway...

Klimax - 08 06 08 - 15:47

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What's bad about OE???

All Microsoft email clients should be BANNED from the Internet for propagating top posting, which is perfectly fine if you like reading conversations upside down. They're also notorious for their complete inability to wrap quoted text properly or strip signatures when quoting. All email I get that's written with a Outlook or Outlook Express is always horribly formatted and contains ungodly amounts of irrelevant text.

Phaeron - 08 06 08 - 15:52

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First about top posting:
These are fine for individual mail as there are only a limited number of users, which normally read all mails.
On the usenet, where there are millions of readers which do net get/read every message, top postings are not good.
So top posting is not bad by nature, as always it depends on the context.

And about OE:
It has too many unfixed security holes.

Maddes (link) - 08 06 08 - 17:03

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Hi Avery,

I'm not really surprised by this news. This is ANOTHER of the famous Windows 'BUGS' that has remained unfixed for OVER a decade. Windows NT4.0 suffers from this problem. Explorer was always the single most buggy component of the OS and obviously this position has not improved.

The only way to clear it is to wipe the ShellIconCache (or simpler for most people) reboot the system !

To quote a line from Douglas Adams:

Slartibardfast: "Frighful cock-up, the mice are furious !"

Calvin.

Calvin (link) - 09 06 08 - 03:58

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Another way to clean up the ShellIconCache, is to install TweakUI for Win9x - it allows you to do it with a pair of clicks (and it has other nifty options too). I wonder if there isn't a faster way to do it... What exactly is called when cleaning up the cache? Does anybody know?

Mitch 74 (link) - 09 06 08 - 04:17

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I think tweak ui sets the shell font to 33px, then back down to 32px, and maybe one of the shellnotify (can't remember the name atm) functions (If you really wanted to know, tweak ui is in the windows2000 source code that leaked years ago)

anders - 09 06 08 - 10:57

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@Klimax

You should be banned from internet for posting an irrelevant comment concerning this update. Sometimes my icons on the desktop changes picture with each other.

joakim - 11 06 08 - 08:18

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This bug was really annoying and somewhat frequent in 98. I don't think I've encountered it in XP. Any idea what triggers it?

Calvin: But they have fixed some bugs. At least in XP you can delete or move more than 30 files in Explorer without having it go stuck. (Well, that is, assuming Explorer or a random shell extension didn't lock them up for that reason or another.)

shae - 11 06 08 - 10:58

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How could you put your quicklaunch toolbar under the Start button?

nick - 12 06 08 - 02:10

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Oh, you probably can't see what's going on in that screenshot. I actually dock my taskbar vertically on the left side. I find it works out better with the extra space available on a widescreen display, and it encourages me to not have under-the-taskbar window placement bugs in my code. Unfortunately, it also encourages me to have a million apps open, which amuses my friends (all the window buttons stack very nicely in this configuration).

Phaeron - 12 06 08 - 02:14

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don't tell me you place the taskbar vertically :)

nick - 12 06 08 - 02:14

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@shae:

I really haven't noticed any differences in the behaviour of Explorer from NT4 to Win2k to XP. the move/copy function in all of them is INORDINATELY SSSSLLLLLOOOOWWWW.....

The classic behaviour on Explorer (ANY Win NT base OS ie: NT4, 2k, XP, can't comment on Vista) that really breaks me up is what happens when delete a whole heap of files, then select 'empty recycle bin' - you get the priceless announcement "Preparing to empty the recycle bin..." or some such nonsense ! and a huge pregnant puase whilst the hard disk thrashes around doing God knows what !

Moral of the story with Windows OS is simple - when dealing with large numbers of files (be it move, copy, delete, whatever) FORGET Explorer and try a command prompt !

Calvin (link) - 12 06 08 - 09:29

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I got the same misbehaviour after installing pivot software from HP's tool disk to a XPSP3 system.
The icons were displayed correctly until pivot driver starts. The screen flaashes and the icons are
unvisibel or mixed up.
Cleaning DLLcache doesn't change anything.
You can edit desktop.ini (add a space char, delete it, save). Then it resets until next login.
My only working solution was deinstalling pivot.
P.S. HP ignores the error.

Karl

Karl Riede - 07 07 08 - 04:24

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