PDA

View Full Version : Annoying Icon Reload Issue



Niall Fernie
12-Jun-09, 08:23
I don't often ask for help as I'm fairly technically minded and can usually find help on Google and various forums that I inhabit but this one has stumped me.

My PC is fine and dandy all of the time, no virii or malware make it in the door (touching wood with my toes as I type this) so I can only put this problem down to something that XP is doing.

I thought I'd ask the guys on here as there seems to be a fairly wide range of experience between you all.

Its my desktop icons that are bugging me. Its not that they dont work or do strange things when I click them its when I access one of the partitions on my HDD via My Computer. All of the desktop icons revert to the standard file icon and then over a period of about 30-60 seconds the HDD goes into overdrive and the icons are slowly replaced one at a time by the correct icon for the shortcut.

I've tried all kinds to get this to stop over the years but I cannot find a solution. I've used the Powertoys supplied by MS to rebuild the icon cache and also used deletelater to remove the cache altogether and force it to be rebuild from scratch. The drive is regularly defragged and is partitioned so that my pagefile, windows and sundry files/programs all have a nice clean space to themselves (only one desktop icon links to a partition other than the windows partition). The PC boots from power on to usable in 27 seconds (with an old 250gb IDE drive I might add :) ) and this issue does not show up at boot. Also the problem does not occur in any kind of recognisable pattern, not every time and happens with nothing running and also with a ton of apps running.

Also I can do things in apps or system windows while this is going on and the PC is only a little slower than usual while it drags the icons back to life.

Its not really a problem, just one of those really annoying things that I could do with out. Any suggestions of things to try or places to look would be most appreciated.

To give you an idea of how anal I am about this kind of thing, IE7 has loaded by the time I've finished my second click, grrrr!!!!

lazytown
12-Jun-09, 08:47
Hi Niall,
Are you using any custom desktop themes or Active Desktops?
Also do you have indexing turned on as this can slow your machine down.
Other things to check is your graphics properties, screen refresh rate/etc

Niall Fernie
12-Jun-09, 09:04
No themes, no active desktop and indexing off.

GFX card is GeForce 260 and everything is on full.

This is a problem I've had over several incarnations of this PC and its XP installation.

Metalattakk
12-Jun-09, 12:24
Its not really a problem, just one of those really annoying things that I could do with out. Any suggestions of things to try or places to look would be most appreciated.

I believe you need to increase the icon cache size. *Try the left-hand side option 121 (Increase Icon Cache) of this page:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

It's a VBScript that will change your registry, so only do it if you know what you're doing - and only if you're not going to blame me if it all goes titsup. :D



*Ref: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-xp-support/787986.htm

Niall Fernie
13-Jun-09, 07:33
Many thanks for that, I've not had a chance to see if its worked but its a new possible solution for me. I did a bit of further reading on it and it looks like it should fix it. I manually edited the registry and added the required key, will report back if I dont see the problem in a day or so :)

Niall Fernie
14-Jun-09, 07:26
Looks like thats done the trick MA, thanks for the pointer.