Win98 SE maintains a "cache file" of desktop icons.  I believe this can
become corrupt; the TweakUI applet (the most important of the PowerToys set,
hopefully still available for download) includes on its "Repair" tab a
button to trigger a rebuild of the desktop icon cache.

  I seem to recall that in Win95, this file was (by default) too small.  I'm
not sure if the default size was upped in 98 or not.  You can force a
specific size by creating/editing a registy value under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer

You want a "String value" named "Max Cached Icons" and its value should be a
hefty number like 2048.

David Gillett



On 3 Mar 2005 at 15:03, Leigh Jennings wrote:

> HI Listers
>
> I am looking after a small network which has a problem on one of its pc's.
> A win98 SE  pc is suddenly  showing black boxes in place of icons on the
> desk top and in explorer. I Instructed the user to run the system file
> checker but it found no faults.
>
> It seems to me that this windows installation has a corrupted file that
> holds the icon information, but how to fix it if "SFC" cant find it?
>
> I would expect a re-installation of win98 SE would fix it but that could
> render their Zip-drive Backup software useless and to date they haven't
> found their backup copy of the software.
>
> Any suggestions on how to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated
>
> The network is  not connected to the internet at all.
>
> TIA
> Leigh Jennings
>
>
> Leigh Jennings
> Hound Heaven Web Design
> WEB:             http://www.houndheaven.com.au
> EMAIL:  [log in to unmask]
>
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