My Windows Explorer has suddenly started displaying black squares instead of the thumbnail icons for folders, .txt files, etc. The icons for Word, Powerpoint and many other applications are fine. Any help to restore the icons will be appreciated !!!

One of the possible options is going to your windows explorer, menu View, Options, File Types. Here you can change your icons for all your files. There is an entry for folders too. In the past I already messed around with other filetypes / icons (without any problems). I can't guarantee that this wil work with folders, but normally it should work. Actually, these file types are just linksto your registry (HKEY_Root). You can change the icons in the registry too, but there are only escape-sequences. Quite a thing to find the wright value. Let me know if it worked out.

Thanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately it didn't work out. Even if I set the icon as you mentioned, it simply turns black once again. I haven't really gone into the registry settings, though I'm quite certain now that something is wrong there. If anyone can tell me which particular key I should be looking at, I can compare the value with other PCs where things are working fine. Thanks in advance.

Try this I had a similar problem and this fixed it. SYMPTOMS ======== The Windows desktop icons may not be correctly displayed on the desktop. In some cases, the icons may be displayed as black or possibly in other colors. Ultimately, the icons do not appear as advertised. Deleting and re-creating the shortcuts does not fix the problem. Newly created shortcuts are also affected by the problem. Non-shortcut icons such as My Computer, Recycle Bin, and folders are unaffected by this problem. CAUSE ===== The reason that the icons are displayed incorrectly may be related to the use of TweakUI in conjunction with Internet Explorer 4.0. This occurs because of corruption in the Icon Cache file. RESOLUTION ========== To ensure that the icons are displayed correctly, complete the following steps. 1. Uninstall TweakUI from the system (if installed). 2. Open Start Menu, Settings, Control Panel, then click the Display icon. 3. Select the Appearance tab. 4. Select the icon in the Item Box. 5. Increase the icon unit by 1. 6. Select Apply. 7. Decrease the icon unit by 1. 8. Select OK. 1. Delete the file %systemroot%\ShellIconCache Note: This file has a hidden attribute. 2. Log off and log back on to see the correct icons.