Delete the corrupted icon cache in Windows 10 Reset the in-memory icon cache in Windows 10 with a small freeware app Option one. To reset the icon cache in Windows 10, there are two methods available: Despite this being a fairly common issue, Microsoft didn't provide any tool bundled with the operating system to fix it. Unfortunately, there is no special button or option in Windows 10 to rebuild the icon cache. Read this article:įix broken icons (reset icon cache) in Windows 10 without reboot To fix this, you need to reset the icon cache.Įdit: there is a better way to reset the icon cache and fix broken icons.
Some shortcuts can display the incorrect icons. Some files in File Explorer and the Desktop can stop showing the right icons or get a blank 'unknown file type' icon. If the cache ever gets corrupted, Windows displays wrong icons. This allows File Explorer to work faster, but it has an annoying side effect. This special file contains icons for many apps and file types, so File Explorer doesn't need to extract the icons for known file extensions and apps. To show icons faster, Windows caches them into a file.