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Thread ID: 16886 2002-03-20 21:44:00 Old faithful showing Alzheimic icon behaviour at boot Guest (0) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
39922 2002-03-20 21:44:00 Hi Team

Old faithful, my Win98 box (original version + SP1) with P166, A-Trend 5030 MB & 192MB Ram) has developed a strange icon effect during boot.

The first time the shortcut icons appear on screen they are generic, but gradually they fill in their proper images one by one at random over the screen. This takes about 20 to 30 seconds to complete as there are 53 of them in all.

Boot time doesn't seem to be extended much and the computer is otherwise going fine. I seem to recall this happening once or twice before but this was some time ago. If I remember correctly, I didn't do anything about it and it just went away.

It looks for all the world like the computer has to go find the icons one by one from the various parent files.

Housekeeping is up to date with not many redundant files around and scan disk/defrag current as well.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Billy 8-{)
Guest (0)
39923 2002-03-20 22:25:00 sounds like the icon cache as gone corrupt. if i remember rightly you can delete it and windows will rebuild it. look for the file 'shelliconcache' in the windows folder. you will need to rebot twice for it to be ineffect. Guest (0)
39924 2002-03-20 23:46:00 I would start by reducing the number of icons from the desktop. If you need them handy create a folder on the desktop and drag and drop the icons into it.

www.techadvice.com
Guest (0)
39925 2002-03-20 23:56:00 Hi Billy, that problem happened to me as the number of icons kept increasing, and I had multiple nested folders/icons within icons.

I found that the icon cache size was too small to hold them all.

If you go into the registry and find your way to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr ent version\explorer

Highlight this key, and in the right pane there should be a string, MaxCachedicons, if the value is 512, change it to something like 2048.

If that string isnt there, put one in by right clicking the right pane and choose New, String Value.

You will then find the icons pop straight up when you re-boot.

Cheers
Guest (0)
39926 2002-03-21 06:26:00 Jeeze Terry, tweak`e!

You guys are magic. How the hell do you learn these things?

I added MaxCachedIcons and the value 2048 but this didn't help much. After two reboots it got better but wasn't right so I deleted ShellIconCache and rebooted -there was no improvement and ShellIconCache was not rebuilt. Three more reboots (because ZoneAlarm started playing up, I'll post that problem if it reoccurs) and bang, all the icons were there in one hit. Now the old girl rises to the occasion like she's on Viagra.

Cheers & thanks

Billy 8-{)
Guest (0)
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