How to Fix Black Desktop Icons in Windows 7

Last Updated: March 29, 2019

In Windows 7, some desktop icons turn black after a normal shutdown. If you're faced with the black icons problem, there are some steps you can take to fix.

Steps

1
Kill the explorer.exe process first. Right click on the Task Bar and select Start Task Manager. When you have Task Manager opened, click on the Processes tab. Under the tab, locate explorer.exe, right-click on it and chose End Process. Click on End Process in the confirmation dialogue box.
2
Open Command Prompt. Click on the File menu in the Task Manager and select New Task (Run...). Now type CMD in the box and press ↵ Enter. You will see command prompt window opened.
3
Enter the commands: In the Command Prompt window, you have to type the below commands one by one. Type the commands in the order listed as following and press ↵ Enter at the end of each command.
- CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
- DEL IconCache.db /a
- exit
4
Run the Explorer.exe Process again. Now again click on the File menu in Task Manager and select New Task (Run...), type CMD in the box and press ↵ Enter key to open Command Prompt again. Type in the following command in CMD and press ↵ Enter at the end. After entering the below command, you will find your desktop again with fixed icons.
- explorer.exe

Community Q&A

Question

I did this and it worked. But after every startup in w7 the icons turn black again! How can I solve this permanently?

The coding cat

Community Answer

It may be something to do with your out-of-date Windows version (version 7). I would recommend upgrading to Windows 10.