Thursday, February 2, 2012

generic Windows icons for Office apps (in this case Office 2007 on Windows 7)

I've seen this twice and fixed it the same way both times. On the user's desktop, he/she has generic Windows icons instead of the typical Word or Outlook icons in the taskbar. Here's what that looks like:


I've been able to fix it each time with a batch file I found. Since I can't attach the batch file to this post, I'll put the text of the file here, since it's short:

@echo off
cls
echo The Explorer process must be killed to delete the Icon DB.
echo Please SAVE ALL OPEN WORK FIRST
pause
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
echo Attempting to delete Icon DB...
If exist %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db goto delID
echo Previous Icon DB not found...trying to build a new one
goto :main

:delID
cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
del IconCache.db /a
pause
echo Icon DB successfully deleted
goto main

:main
echo Windows 7 must be restarted to rebuild the Icon DB.
echo Restart now? (Y/N):
set /p choice=
If %choice% == y goto end
echo Shutdown aborted...please close this window
explorer.exe

:end
shutdown /r /t 0
exit