ShellIconCache

It's a beast.

Get It Try It

Windows Explorer - in either of its incarnations - is a beast. The work load this program takes on is monstrous. It makes so many things look seamless and 'natural' when they're not seamless or natural at all.

There's no physical difference, for example, between your 'desktop' at the top of your tree view in the left pane of Explorer and the disk directory of the same name located under your own personal profile (so when you hear people say 'I know I saved the file somewhere - it's not on my disk so it must be on my desktop' then you know they're raw newbies). And all the cute file icons Explorer displays actually take so much crunching that if left to its own, this program would often crash the operating system.

Icons are obtuse as regards accessibility. It's something like a treasure hunt for Explorer - it has to look in one place to get a clue to the next place to look, and so on. It takes quite a while and several thousand machine instructions to get the icon up there. And this would never do. So, to save time and the odd crash, Microsoft invented the icon cache.

This file - ShellIconCache - is always located in your 'Windows' directory. By default that will be 'Windows' on Windows 9x and 'WINNT' on Windows NT. This file is always written at system shutdown and is used on system startup, and for a number of other reasons may be written after using applets in Control Panel.

It's a cache of indexed icons and no more, but it helps Explorer get the icons it needs and in a hurry too. The problem comes when the bugs start creeping out of the woodwork. The Windows 9x shell, which interfaces with Explorer, is rather sadly bugged and not particularly durable under stress conditions. The ShellIconCache file can become corrupt, and when it does your desktop will 'turn to mush'.

Suddenly everything on your desktop will look 'weird'. Your fonts might get funny too. It's time to do some serious system surgery. All you really have to do is delete the file. That's right, it won't hurt you, Microsoft won't jump out of the screen and bite you, just delete it.

If this doesn't help, then go into Control Panel and fire up the 'Desktop' applet, the one with settings for icon sizes. Now just change one setting, either horizontal or vertical, of the shell icon size and hit 'Apply'. That's all. You'll see your system go a bit crazy for a while and then things will return to normal again and your icons and fonts should be all right. Now just shift the icon settings back again. That's all there is to it.

This is the official Microsoft work-around, by the way: after all these years, they still haven't ironed out the wrinkles and stamped out the bugs.

And to prevent this from ever happening in the future, always delete ShellIconCache when turning down the system for the night. As long as your system has to create the cache from scratch on system startup, there's less chance of it becoming corrupt.

Another way is to avoid using Explorer altogether: radsoft.net has the 'Explorer Killer' X-file showcased elsewhere on this site. As the developers at radsoft.net have literally never used either Explorer for file browsing, the 'mush syndrome' has never hit in this neck of the woods, and if people hadn't written to us and asked us for help, we would never have known about it.

And if you are running Windows 98 and want a quick temporary increase in reliability and speed, consider dropping use of the Active Desktop and Internet Explorer as your file browsing tool.