Computer Hope

Task bar icons are wrong after reboot.

I rebooted my Win 7 PC yesterday, and all my task bar icons are not what they should be.

In my over 50 years of working the computers(started in '72 on an IBM 360), I've never seen anything like this.

I had 10 task bar pinned programs(with their correct icons)...after the reboot, all 10 pinned programs were still there, except they all had the wrong icons. When I hovered over the icon, the name of the program would appear above it(so I know what program it is).

I was able to 'fix' 5 of them by un-pinning the program, and re-running it, then pinning it back(with the correct icon).

But, for 5 of the programs, that didn't work. For example my Windows Explorer had a Chrome icon(fixed). The ones I can't seem to fix are:

Windows Media Player shows my burning software icon,

my LView image program shows a Firefox icon,

another version of LView shows a Windows Media Player icon,   

my control panel shows a JDownloader icon

my wordpad shows a Nvidia icon

Any ideas of what would have caused this, and how to fix the icons to what they should be?

Thanks!   

Try clearing the icon cache and see if that helps:

1) Manual method: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-reset-icon-cache-database-windows-10

2) Easy method: Download & install Winaero Tweaker (https://winaero.com/download-winaero-tweaker/), on the left side go to "Tools" and then "Reset Icon Cache"

Thanks for the fast response. I did that...nothing's changed. Is there a way to 'refresh' the task bar, or do I need to reboot?

No, no way to refresh the taskbar. Rebooting is always a good idea when you run into an anomaly such as yours.

Rebooted, and a new icon cache file was created...but nothing's changed...task bar icons are still wrong. Do I need to change each one manually? I tried that before, and it wouldn't 'take'.

Two more things to address...not only are my task bar icons not right, they are also wrong in the start menu...BUT, they are correct in Task Mgr. Weird!

Well, at this point I'm guessing but I'd suggest running a full scan with BOTH your installed AV and with MalwareBytes.

Hopefully you have a backup disk image recently created that you can restore. If not, shame on you