How to rebuild the icon cache in Windows 11 | Free Download

Windows 11 uses the icon cache extensively to display application icons and other elements of the operating system. It is designed to speed up the loading and display of icons.

Sometimes, problems may arise. A common problem is corruption of the icon cache. This may result in incorrect, outdated, duplicate, missing or broken icons, and other problems.

The reason for this, most of the time, is corruption of the icon cache. The solution in that case is to rebuild the icon cache.

This guide explains how to do it on Windows 11. The same method works on Windows 10 as well.

Rebuilding Icon Cache in Windows 11

You can rebuild the icon cache using a single command. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-X to display the administrative menu.
2. Select Terminal from the menu.
3. Confirm the security prompt by selecting the Yes option.
4. Paste the command “ie4uinit.exe -show” and press Enter-key.

Note that you don’t get any feedback; This is normal and nothing to worry about.

sledgehammer method

If the above command does not fix icon cache on Windows 11 system, you can try the following, which is more powerful.

1. Open the Start menu.
2. To launch it, type cmd and select Command Prompt.
3. paste order ie4uinit.exe -show And press Enter-key.
4. paste order taskkill /im explorer.exe /f And press Enter-key.
5. paste order CD %userprofile%AppDataLocal And press Enter-key.
6. Type del iconcache.db /a And press Enter-key.
7. paste order cd %localappdata%MicrosoftWindowsExplorer And press Enter-key.
8. Type from iconcache* And press Enter-key.
9. Type start explorer.exe And press Enter-key.

You might be surprised at what some commands do.

• taskkill /f /im explorer.exe – This command forcefully terminates the explorer.exe process. Note that when executed this removes the taskbar, among other things. Don’t worry, the command start explorer.exe eventually restarts Explorer.
• CD /d %userprofile%AppDataLocal – This command changes the directory to the user’s AppDataLocal directory.
• del IconCache.db /a /f /q – This command removes the IconCache.db file
• del iconcash* /a /f /q – The command deletes all files starting with iconcache in the %localappdata%MicrosoftWindowsExplorer folder.

Rebuilding does not solve all icon related problems

Rebuilding works if the icon cache has been corrupted. In some other cases it does not work. For example, when an icon file is moved or deleted on the system.

Thanks for reading..