Topic: desktop icons

[thesaint]

Hello everyone its a long time since Ive been on here but i have had a problem for a long time now with my icons suddenly disappearing on my desktop and then windows will rewrite them. Ive deleted windows icon cache so its not that, can anyone come up with a solution to this one please. Im using windows xp home with 3gig of memory and a 3gig processor dual core
Phil

[Simon]

Hi Phil,

When you say Windows rewrites them, do you mean that you get the little 'unidentified program' icon for a few seconds, then the proper icons reappear?  If so, I think it's quite normal, as it happens to me all the time, and it's just Windows Explorer having a moment.  Come back to us if that's not it, and someone more competent will be along to help. 

[Clive]

Me too.  I think it happens when Windoze is busy doing other things in the background or looking for new ways to annoy us. 

[thesaint]

Yes it does that but also when i am copying files say video files from one location ie drive to drive it will suddenly stop doing that close the action and my desktop will be blank of all icons and then it will rewrite them to the desktop, quite annoying, thanks for the replies by the way

[Simon]

Copying video files is quite a resource heavy process, and if you're trying to do other stuff at the same time, it may just be your processor struggling to keep up.  Do you have much going on at the same time? 

[thesaint]

No Simon just copying and pasting from one drive to another. I would have thought it shouldnt stress my cpu especially with 2 cores running at 3ghz.

[Simon]

You're probably right, I just wondered if you had several applications running in the background which might have been taking resources. 

The only thing I can suggest is, next time it happens, check Task Manager for running processes, and see if anything's maxing out the CPU, or check the error logs and see if there's anything untoward in there.  I assume you've done the usual virus and spyware scans? 

As I said before, I'm no expert, so if anyone else has any ideas, please shout. 

[Rik]

If one of the drives was USB, it would add some processor load, but it really shouldn't be an issue. The icon cache seems to be re-written by Windows almost on a whim, I'm sure there's some logic or trigger, but I've never worked it out.