I customized my MY COMPUTER, MY NETWORK PLACES, and RECYCLE BIN icons but they periodically change back to their defaults seemingly at random. I found a couple of other posts where this question was asked but there never was a conclusive reply. Whatever it is, seems to effect these 3 icons ONLY! I've increased my max icon cache. I've used TweakUI to repair my icons. Memory resources show about 50% usage on Task Manager's Performance tab. I have McAfee's virus shield and scanner and everything is up to date. I've scanned multiple times and nothing was found. I am up to date on all Windows Update patches. Please note, this is NOT the problem where they turn into that icon that windows uses when it does not know what icon to give. This is a case of customized icons spontaneously reverting back to their own default icons. Here are some additional observations: From time to time I notice that my RECYCLE BIN icon is changed but the other two are not. At this point if I refresh my desktop then the other two change as well. Wouldn't this seem to indicate that something is changing these icon values in the registry without forcing a refresh? The RECYCLE BIN icon change probably shows up first because I've deleted something and that caused it to refresh itself from whatever is in the registry. I am NOT using the Web enabled or Active desktop. One other thing that may or may not be totally unrelated. At the same time this started happening, I noticed that the pulldown menus of certain applications (Notepad, Outlook, etc) show some weird highlighting when I hover the mouse over them. These pulldowns normally highlight when you hover the mouse over them but this is different. It highlights white and then when I move the mouse away, the text still retains a white outline. This is consistant and happens every time. I'm using the standard Windows XP theme. I tried creating my own theme. I set the Windows XP theme then I changed the icons and then saved THAT as my own custom theme. That didn't help either. Please help me figure this out. This happened to me before and I completely formatted and reinstalled XP. The problem went away for about 1 month and then came back. The problem manifested itself at a time when I had not recently installed anything so I can't even trace it back to a specific install or app change. I'm stumped! I am running XP Home.

Tried this ? In Windows Explorer or Control Panel, click Tools in the Menu bar, click Folder Options, click View tab, in Advanced Settings list, find and check mark "Remember each folder's view settings"

I checked and that particular setting was already checked. I tried unchecking it just for kicks and giggles but that didn't work so I reset it and the problem is still there.

I had a similar problem with the recycle bin icon. After I used TweakUI to remove the short cut arrows from the desktop icons, the XP recycle bin icon changed to a 98-style icon, and no way could I change it back. Finally I updated the drivers to my Nvidia TNT2 video card and the XP icon came back. So maybe you could try updating your video driver?

I'm at the latest revision of my ATI Radeon drivers. I updated them AFTER this mess started happening but it didn't fix the issue. I'm convinced that SOMETHING is changing the values in the registry!

I've had precisely the same problem, and investigated all the remedies I could think of: Norton AV scan, Ad-Aware 6 scan, TweakUI, increasing the iconcache's size, deleting the iconcache altogether, etc. I searched around Micro$oft's knowledge base and found a registry fix for *restoring* the *default desktop icons.* http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;185217 By plugging in the absolute paths to your custom icons in place of the paths to the default icons, I was able to circumvent whatever mechanism it is that is resetting the icons. Realize that this is possibly only a remedy to the symptom (icons resetting to defaults(which is what we're changing here)) but not the cause (corrupted icon cache? unidentified malicious script?) I'm fairly certain this will work for any of you guys who are experiencing trouble, so hold off on reinstalling windows until you try this :) MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL! and HAPPY HANNUKAH!