Icons for special folders in Vista
How to Fix Icons for special folders in Vista
Tech Advice 1
↣ People have been asking me several times why there folder’s “pretty” icons keep reverting back to default icons.
↣ After reading a lot of queries I decide to put all the information at one place.
Let us an example to illustrate the problem.
↣ If you notice, the Music folder here is showing the generic folder icon instead of the slick one that it should be using
↣ There is a hidden file called desktop.ini that is responsible for setting icons to different folders.
↣ The problem is that a lot of applications seem to screw with this file and cause it to become corrupted or otherwise inoperative.
What we will try to do is restore the file back to its original state.
↣ Open the RUN Command window by pressing WIN Key + R. Type the command below to open up the desktop.ini file.
↣ notepad %USERPROFILE%\music\desktop.ini
↣ If you wanted to open the desktop.ini file in the pictures folder instead, substitute “pictures” for “music” in the command, like this:
↣ notepad %USERPROFILE%\pictures\desktop.ini
The content of the file should look like this but unfortunately, it will not be similar to the one shown below.
↣ [.ShellClassInfo]
↣ LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21790
↣ InfoTip=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-12689
↣ IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-108
↣ IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll
↣ IconIndex=-237
↣ [LocalizedFileNames]
↣ Sample Music.lnk=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21806
↣ Select the entire contents of your file and replace it with the one shown above.
↣ In order to see the effect of the changes, you will have to logout and login back.
Fix Icons for special folders in Vista icons in windows windows 10 shell icons
Hopefully by this point your icons should be back to looking good again…
For safety reasons, I recommend you create a backup copy of your original desktop.ini file in any folder and use it to show a custom icon.