How to rebuild the icon cache in Windows 10

[JamieKavanagh]

The icon cache in Windows 10 is where the system goes to find all those icons you see on your desktop and in folders. A cache of the most frequently accessed icons is held in memory so Windows can quickly load them, speeding up the user experience. If you need to rebuild the icon cache in Windows 10, here’s how you do it.

The icon cache in Windows 10 is a small database held in memory and written to a file on reboot to provide fast access to the icons you use most. When the computer is switched on, the cache is held in memory. When it is turned off, it is written to a file.

You can find your icon cache at: ‘C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer’. Just switch ‘username’ with your computer account username to make it work.

If something goes wrong with the icon cache, it can cause issues with the Windows desktop. Rebuilding that cache should alleviate the issue.

Rebuild the icon cache in Windows 10
1. Save everything you need to save before starting the rebuild.
2. Navigate to ‘C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer’.
3. Delete all iconcache files you find.
4. Hold shift and right click in the Explorer folder and select Open command window here.
5. Open Task Manager and stop the Windows Explorer process. You should now only see the CMD window.
6. Type or paste ‘del iconcache*’.
7. Reboot your machine or restart an Explorer process in Task manager under File, Run new task.

Once the desktop has reloaded, any missing or corrupt icons should reappear as normal.

Rebuild the icon cache using command line
As always, there is a command line method to achieve the same thing.

1. Open a CMD window as an administrator.
2. Type or paste ‘ ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache’
3. Type or paste ‘taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F’.
4. Type or paste ‘DEL /A /Q "%localappdata%\IconCache.db"’.
5. Type or paste ‘DEL /A /F /Q "%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\iconcache*"’.
6. Type or paste ‘shutdown /r /f /t 00’.

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