Hi, first of all, a very Happy New Year to everyone. Now for my problem: I use Win XP SP2 on a 2.8 Ghz dualcore P4 processor machine, 1 Gb RAM, 250 Mb HDD. Whenever I boot up, or even when I return to the bare desktop after having had a number of windows open for a while, my icons on the desktop are all blank ones, such as the ones you get when there is no program associated with a certain file. Then, one by one, they begin to get the appearance they should have, but it is a real drag which takes ages, and the PC is not very responsive while it happens. I seem to remember that I had a similar problem in the past and someone recommended a program which seemed to help, and, AFAIR, the program had something to do with Favicon. But that might date back to the days when I still used Win 98, I can't really remember. However, is there anyone who knows a solution to that icon problem, as it really get s on my nerves sometimes. All help will be much appreciated.

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It could be two thins the first one rather simple with a even more simple fix, right click on your desk top select the Arrange Icons menu and see if the Show Icons on Desktop is selected. The other one is rather not so simple if the first one doesn't work and its either a OS glitch or a virus, but my searching hasn't produce to many results on that.

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Yes, "Show icons" is ticked.
So, might be more difficult than I imagined.

Thank you for your reply.

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Have you tried a spyware or antivirus scan? Try it and see if there is any malware or viruses in your computer. Also check and see if there are many programs on start up that could be making your computer unresponsive or sluggish. Go to the start menu, then click on run, then type: msinfo32. Then on software environment check how many startup programs you have. If you have many startup programs than that is most definitely the reason why it take a while for your computer to respond or for the icons to begin to show up.

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Antivirus scan is done evry day, antispyware twice a week.
At the moment I am not aware of any malware.
I do have quite a few startup items, the funny thing is, quite a few of them appear in the list more than once, eg. I have CTFMON in there 5 times, desktop 4 times.
This does not look right to me, or is that normal?
If not, how can I safely remove redundant entries without having a major crash?

Thanks.

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well if you have multiple entries in your stat up menu check in your add/remove programs folder to see if there are multiple copies or not. If so remove then and see if that helps, if not check to see if they are shortcuts and if so just right click and delete them from there. Of course their is the registry route but I am not experienced enough to tell you where to go to work on that.

As for the disappearing icons I would say update the drivers for your computer, by going to the driver support on that computer's website and then install drivers in 2007 range, preferably in the last 6-7 months. Of course make sure the driver updates are for your computer before installing them, and make sure you have a back up somewhere just in case something goes wrong, like the computer not accepting the drivers for some reason.

As for the Icons disappearing if its not the virus situation or the one I mention that it could just be a glitch in the GUI on your computer, and so you might want to check to Microsoft support website and see what they mention about that.

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I hear BootVis is an excellent utility to analyze what services and programs are starting up on boot and loading of the OS. I suggest you kill any extraneous services, startup programs, and clean up your boot sequence... or at least optimize start up so that your hard drive will be free to find and access your icon files faster.

Then again, it could just be Windows. Wouldn't surprise me.

Are these default icons or icons being called from somewhere else? I have a similar issue, but it's not really bad since I am loading my personal icons from my external hard drive.

CTFMON.exe is a program instance that Microsoft uses as a support for certain features. You can read more about it here and how to disable it.

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Try increasing the size of your icon cache by changing this registry key value to 2048 or larger:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/Max Cached Icons

If that "Max Cached Icons" key does not exist in the registry, create it.



-reply by DrCola

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