Repairing and Retoring Icons in Windows XP !
Applicable to the following issues:
  • Damaged or missing Icons.
  • Icon missing colors or displayed as black boxes.
  • Icons merged with one another.
  • Many more ...
The reasons are either the icon cache which stores this icon information is damaged or corrupted.

Uninstalling TweakUI has also fixed the issue in some cases.

Method 1: Refresing Icon Cache
1. Right-click on the Desktop.

2. Select Personalize and select Display Settings.
Display Settings

3. Change the Color from 32 bit to 16 bit and click Apply.

4. Change the Color back to 32 bit and click Apply.
Method 2: Rebuilding Icon Cache
1. Click on the Vista logo (similar to the "Start" button).
2. In the "Start Search" box type type CMD or CMD.EXE and Hit Enter. ( Refer Screen Shot below )
Run
You will see a similar window
cmd prompt
3.You may need to kill explorer before rebuilding the icon cache. To do this, following either of these:
A. Kill Explorer.exe from Task Manager.
B. Run the following line from the command prompt opened above:
taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
4. Run the following commands one by one as shown below to complete the task: (Note the spaces in each command)

CD %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local

attrib –h IconCache.db

del IconCache.db
5. Run explorer.exe or restart your machine.
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