Question Desktop Icons Disappear and Reappear

[ajburr]

My desktop PC has been doing something strange lately. About once a minute the icons on the taskbar will flicker, then the icons for every folder and app on my desktop turn into white rectangles and then back to normal.

Aside from this just being an annoying distraction, I'm worried it's a sign of something going wrong either with Windows 10 or my hardware.

Here are my specs:

Intel i7 8th Gen.
nVidia RTX 2080
64 GB RAM
2x SanDisk 500 GB SSD

If more info is needed I'll provide it. This is a computer I put together myself and I'm running on (3) 4k monitors (though I only play games on one screen). I have a liquid cooler on my processor and a fan cooler on my RAM, along with 5 other case fans.

 

[Darkbreeze]

First thing I'd try is rebuilding the icon cache.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/rebuild-icon-clear-thumbnail-cache-windows-10

 

[ajburr]

I wasn't able to follow those instructions. I couldn't delete the icon cache files. Also, it says to end the task Windows Explorer, and then run cmd.exe. This makes no sense, because once I end Windows Explorer, there's nothing I can click on or type; everything goes black and all icons disappear as well as the taskbar.

 

[Darkbreeze]

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-reset-icon-cache-database-windows-10

 

[ajburr]

Okay, I tried those steps and it didn't help. I also reset Windows (for this problem and something else) and that fixed the problem briefly. After a while though the icons started acting up again. Any other ideas?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Clean install?

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Try this to reset icon cache. Reset windows icon cache batch file

Run that as Admin

If it keeps happening you’ll probably need to do a clean install as mentioned above

 

[ajburr]

Yeah, the batch file didn't work. And not that I don't appreciate everyone's help, but I'd rather put up with the flickering icons than do yet another reset of my computer, especially a clean install.

Thanks though for your advice!

 

[Darkbreeze]

A reset is not a clean install. A reset is simply that, a reset of the already in place problems and corruption. It doesn't usually fix much of anything UNLESS the problem is in the most basic core components of the operating system.

If you are unwilling to do a clean install, then the problem must not be very annoying.

 

[ajburr]

Well, I did the clean install, and no problems so far. Thanks for the suggestion!!

 

[Darkbreeze]

See, a clean install is usually a far cry from a restore, reset or refresh, none of which do much more than put it back to loaded with the same junk that came installed on it at the beginning or revert to a previous point in time. A clean install is always the best option when there are obvious problems. Glad it worked out for you. Good luck.