How to Rebuild a Broken Icon Cache in Windows 10

In this tutorial, we are going to see how to rebuild a broken icon cache in Windows 10. If you have icons that don’t display properly or are simply broken in Windows 10, it may be due to the icon cache system that may be corrupted.

To display icons faster, the Windows operating system caches them in a file. This somewhat special file contains icons for many applications and file types, so that the file explorer does not need to extract icons for known file extensions and applications every time. This allows the file explorer to work much faster however, it has a very annoying side effect.

In fact, sometimes this famous cache file is corrupted and there it is the drama, Windows will show you wrong icons (not the right icon or simply an empty icon). To solve this problem, you have to reset the icon cache.

Unfortunately, Windows does not offer any solution for this kind of problem, there is no magic button or special option to rebuild the icon cache. Although this is a fairly common problem, Microsoft has not provided a tool to fix it. Even so, there are two methods to reset the icon cache in Windows 10.
 

 

How to Rebuild a Broken Icon Cache in Windows 10

Step 1: The icon cache file is hidden within Windows, so to make it visible, I recommend you to follow this tutorial how to display hidden files.
 

 
Step 2: Press Windows + R to open the Run dialog box. In the Run dialog, type %localappdata% and press Enter.
 

 
This will open this:

C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local

 

 
Step 3: Locate the file named IconCache.db and delete it. Once this is done, restart your computer.
 

 
That’s it. If your icons are still not back after restarting your computer, it means that your cache file was not corrupted.