When I booted up the laptop just now, some of my desktop shortcuts had reverted to generic icons with a *.lnk extension. I deleted C:\Windows\Shelliconcache and rebooted, which appears to have cured the problem. My question is this: What causes this problem? I've obviously heard of it before, because I knew how to solve it, but I don't know WHY the problem occurs. TIA Dave

Because MS underestimated the amount of cache to use for icons. See my registry fix in the "Howtos" on the left (it's at the bottom of the list). DerekW

Thanks Derek. I tried the registry fix, but it kept coming up with an error message. (Something along the lines of "This is not a proper .reg file and can't be merged with the registry." I entered the new string value via regedit, and it seems to have worked. After some digging, I found that the reason the hack in the "How-To's" wasn't working was because there needed to be a header in the file of REGEDIT4. When I added this, it merged just fine. Dave

Ooops, sorry, I thought I'd been back to this post already - must forgot to hit GO button. Yes of-course REGEDIT4 should be there in any .reg file. It must have got lost somehow. I've updated the HowTo. DerekW