Icon mystery

I recently changed to a new hard drive, with XP Professional and SP2, reinstalled all my usual programs and everything has been working fine so far. However, today I noticed something strange in one of my folders. I haven't looked in this particular folder for a few days, perhaps, so I don't know when this appeared, but the image files appear to have the wrong icon (see attached image) and all have different icons despite having the same file extension. It is only happening in this one folder - .jpg images in other folders have the correct icon. In fact, if I copy and paste these files into another folder, they display the correct program icon!

The drive on which these folders are stored is shared via the office network, and from other PCs on the network the icons appear correct, subject to the image program being installed on their computer, i.e. Photoshop or Windows Image Viewer. The .jpg files still open in Photoshop, despite the wrong icon.

I have gone into folder options and tried to change the icon in advanced options, but this has not worked. Although as all other folders have the correct icon, this would appear not to be the problem.

One thing I also noticed the other day is that when I open a folder containing images, the .jpg file icons seem to take some time to display (I use Details view), starting off by displaying an icon as if there is no associated program installed. Eventually the Photoshop icon will appear. If there are many photos in the folder it can take up to half a minute for all the icons to show.

I don't have a thumbs.db file in any of my folders containg images (hidden files are set to show), when viewing in Thumbnail view, as I have unticked 'Do not cache thumbnails' in Folder Options, but this was also the case on my old hard drive and image icon display was not as slow as it is on the new drive, and even thumbnails appeared quite quickly without thumbs.db. I'm not sure if this has any bearing on the original problem, though.

 

Sorry, got that all wrong!

'Do not cache thumbnails' was ticked on my old hard drive. So why, if the box is now unticked, do I not see a thumbs.db file?

 

Amazingly, I've just opened the same folder mentioned above and all the image files are now displaying the correct program icon!

Another strange happening - I have just opened IE to find a site in my Favorites, and when the list first appears the IE icon is there for the sites not in folders, but the folder icons further up weren't appearing properly. This was the same when I went into those folders - the folder icon was the generic Windows icon (as if not associated to a program) but the links not in folders were appearing with the normal IE icon. Just done it again and they're OK.

What could be the issue with the icons?

 

This morning the Favorites menu is displaying OK, but the folder mentioned in my original post has gone funny again. The files are showing the wrong program icons again, but strangely some are different icons to the ones they were displaying yesterday! (See attachment) I suspect they will eventually right themselves, as they did yesterday, but does anyone know what might be going on?

Image file icons in other folders are displaying correctly, but still taking some time to appear in full, depending on the file size of the image.

 

So, this has foxed everyone!

The icons in the folder are still showing wrongly, but they've swapped to different wrong ones again!!

 

Try starting your computer in SAFE mode then restart it in Normal mode. This will rebuild the iconcache.db file.

 

Thank you for helping. Your suggestion worked for the incorrect icon problem. In Safe Mode the folder containing the incorrect icons dispayed the correct icons and when I restarted in Normal Mode the icons were correct, apart from one .bmp file that would only show the generic Windows icon. In Thumbnail view the actual .bmp image was appearing, but in Details view it was just the non-program icon (I hope you know what I'm referring to with this explanation).

However, I think this problem goes a little deeper than the incorrect icons appearing.

While in Safe Mode I noticed that the image folders contained a thumbs.db file, but back in Normal Mode the file was once again missing. As mentioned in my original post, images are taking quite some time to appear when first opening an image folder, whether in Details or Thumbnail view, and when I open two particular image folders (recently created) the computer seizes up and I get a 'Windows Explorer has encountered a problem..' error, followed by a 'Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger has encountered a problem' error. I have to 'End Program' twice and may then have to reboot. Sometimes the program ends OK and goes back to the desktop, but it appears that the system is rebooting, even though I have the settings in Advanced System Properties > Startup and Recovery Settings set NOT to Automatically Restart on a system failure, i.e. the box is unticked.

Not sure if this has any bearing on the matter, but I should explain again that I recently installed a brand new hard drive, but the image folders in question are on the original drive, which I kept as a slave to the new drive, although I have not formatted any of the old partitions as yet, they simply have new drive letters as a result of changing from master to slave.

This is really baffling me.

 

I've been doing some more research and I am beginning to think this is something to do with the missing thumbs.db files. I saw thumbs.db in the image folders in Safe Mode but it is not present in the normal Windows mode.

When the current slave drive was my main and only drive, I had set the system not to cache thumbnails. These image folders remain on the same partition of the same drive as they have always been, but this is now attached as a slave to the new hard drive I installed. I initially did not have the new drive at the same setting, so maybe there is some mixup with the thumbs.db files caching between the two drives. Whatever I set this to now, there are still no thumbs.db files appearing - whether the images are stored on the master or slave drive. I can still see image thumbnails when required, which I sometimes want to do.

If I copy the image files to a folder on the new master hard drive, the images open fine, albeit taking some time to render all the icons, and Explorer does not crash.