Stop Desktop Icons from Randomly Refreshing

By Stephen Bucaro

Do your desktop icons keep redrawing every 30 to 60 seconds? This can be very distracting. You've probably noticed that your computer has also started running much slower than usual. Random refreshing of the desktop icons is usually caused by a full or corrupted icon cache.

The solution is to delete the Iconcache.db file, which will cause Windows to rebuild the file. The Iconcache.db file is located here:

c:\users\[user-name]\AppData\Local\

By default system files are hidden, so if you haven't already, you need to go Control Panel | Folder Options and on the View tab under Hidden files, folders, or drives set the radio button next to "Show hidden files, folders, and drives".

Save all current work and close all desktop applications before performing the following steps.

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the path shown above. Make Explorer full screen to cover all the desktop icons to make sure Windows doesn't access the icon cache to redraw the screen.

2. If you prefer, rename the Iconcache.db file to old_Iconcache.db file. You can always delete old_Iconcache.db after the new Iconcache.db file is created.

3. Windows keeps an active copy of Iconcache.db in RAM. So without closing or resizing Windows Explorer, select Start | Shut down. This will cause the icon cache in RAM to be lost.

Upon restarting, Windows will rebuild the Iconcache.db file. You should find that your desktop icons no longer randomly refresh and that your computer performs much better.

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