Desktop Icons have thin black bars going across them

[rcrez]

Hi Everyone
I was reinstalling a video driver once and then upon boot up, my entire screen had thin black bars over it in a checkerboard pattern.

I restarted, the bars went away except now on a few desktop icons: such as putty and outlook, the black bars remain. If I copy the icon to explorer, the bars disappear, but if I copy it back, they reappear.

Some of the icons in my start menu also have these thin black lines.

Weird huh? How I can clean up my mess...

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Sounds like (or I guess it looks like is more appropriate) you should give thought to clearing out your icon cache just in case it might help.

In Vista, open a Command Prompt and type or copy and paste this command then press Enter:

del /A:H "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db"

After that runs through, reboot the computer and see if you have any better luck.

Hope this helps...

 

[rcrez]

I have WinXP SP2 .. not rich enough for vista yet...
is it the same command?

 

[rcrez]

Nevermind
I changed the desktop color depth and that forced my icons to reset...

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Duh, I really have no idea what made me think you had Vista, sorry. You didn't specify which OS, so my mistake.

In XP there's two ways that I'm personally aware of, one is relatively easy to reset the icon cache, the other requires TweakUI, a cool tweaking app from Microsoft although it's unsupported (always has been).

The first is simple:

Right click the Desktop, choose Properties, click the Appearance tab, click Advanced. In the Item drop down menu box, change the setting to either:

Icon Spacing (Horizontal)

or

Icon Spacing (Vertical)

Memorize what the default value is before you change it, and then change either of those settings, even just 1 digit is enough. When you then click Apply, XP will be forced to recreate the ShellIconCache and it should redo all the icons with the new spacing setting - meaning they'll be further apart horizontally or vertically depending on what you changed and by how much.

Now, just change the setting back to it's original amount and you're back where you started from with a refresh ShellIconCache file.

The second method with TweakUI is a bit more complicated, so give this method a shot and see what happens. You don't necessarily need to reboot after you do it, but if you can, it won't hurt.

If that doesn't work, then TweakUI's method won't either; they both end up doing the same thing which is dumping the old ShellIconCache and recreating it as required.

If it continues, I'd suspect your video card drivers have some issues, there's really not much else that comes to mind.

Hope this helps...

EDIT:
After posting I notice you resolved it.