troubleshooting - Blank white desktop icons on new Windows 7 install

I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 professional on my father's Toshiba Satellite laptop and everything went smoothly except for the fact that certain desktop shortcuts appear as a blank white page.

I've tried:

1. going in and changing the icon to many different things


2. reloading the icon cache by deleting the IconCache.db file


3. uninstalling his Free AVG as he heard the virus scanner might be preventing it (it wasn't and he put it back.)

The one thing these icons have in common is that they are shortcuts to some very old DOS executables. One of them is Word Star 2000 to give you an idea.

Does anybody have any other suggestions besides what we've tried?

Answer

From Fix Blank or White Shortcut Icons on Desktop.

To refresh and reset the icons cache, go to the following folder:

C:\Users\AppData\Local\

To see the hidden AppData folder, go to Organize -> Folder and Search Options -> View tab, and select "Show hidden files, folders and drives", and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)".

Once inside the folder, delete IconCache.db. Create a new file named IconCache.db, and set it to Read Only attribute in Properties (if the file is not read only, the cache won’t be reset). Then restart the computer. Remove the Read Only attribute of IconCache.db file, and the icons cache will be refreshed.
This step will restore the desktop shortcut icons to their lawfully icons.

EDIT

I tried it, and the same behavior is on Vista. Properties of such an icon has the same tabs as the command prompt (cmd), so I think the white page icon is a generic cmd prompt, and Windows treats these as shortcuts to cmd rather than themselves. That's why it's impossible to set their icon.

As another experiment, I created a shortcut to cmd.exe, then modified it to add the parameters of "-k old-prog.com". This time the icon-change worked, but the program didn't ! My conclusion is that the 32-bits cmd.exe cannot run these programs.

I think this is some weird effect of 16-bits emulation on Windows. Apparently the 16-bits cmd.exe doesn't accept icon changes. As 16-bits is now totally abandoned in Windows 64-bits, I don't think there is much point in reporting it to Microsoft.