Internet shorcuts don't work in IE6 after repairing XP Home.

I noticed this, before reinstalling IE8, after a previous repair of XP too.

The desktop shortcuts no longer display the icons which were asigned to them either. They are just the "bare bones" shortcuts.

After I reinstalled IE8 they worked fine and displayed their asigned icons.

Strangely, if I open Chrome and drag and drop the same shortcuts into it, they do work ok. But they don't in Firefox.

I also found, displaying this forum in IE6, that clicking on any of the 'similar threads' in the box above the message entry window, I get a system message saying "The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context.", whatever that means.

Why don't the shortcuts work in IE6 or Firefox?

 

You should not be concerned at all about IE6. It's known to have many problems and it's basiclly a dead browser.
Even Microsoft does not want people using Internet Explorer 6.
http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Try recreating one of those shortcuts from Firefox, then compare the Properties of the old one and new.

 

I'm not. I was just curious about the behaviour of the shortcuts.

All of them worked correctly before, in IE8, Firefox and Chrome.

After the repair to XP, and before IE6 was replaced with IE8, they worked only in Chrome and had lost their icons.

Now, after reinstalling IE8, they work again in all three browsers and have regained their icons.

I don't understand how or why IE6 could have prevented the correct icons being displayed or affected their fucntioning in Firefox.

 

It's probably due to an outdated or corrupt icon cache.
Internet Explorer is an integral part of the operating system.
The cache was probably updated during the IE8 upgrade process.
Similar icon problems can sometimes be remedied by increasing the size of the cache,
which typically requires a manual change in the registry.

Rebuild icon cache to fix incorrectly displayed icons

registry fix: Max Cached Icons

 

Thank you for trying to help, but I still don't really understand what's going on.

If I look at Properties of a shortcut, I am given the opportunity to change its icon. The initial selection of icons varies enormously from one or two to maybe a couple of dozen, depending on the particular shortcut, but it lets me search the system for more. So it seems that there are several places where they are stored

Furthermore, some of the shortcuts on my desktop have icons which I created. They live in an "icon" folder on the C drive.

Since I can hunt, through the Search facility, for an alternative icon if I want to change it, and they can be anywhere on the system, where is the icon cache? And, does it hold a copy of all the available icons?

 

C:\Documents and Settings\%Userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data Iconcache.db

 

I realize it's a lot of stuff to wade through.
The location of the cache is in the first linked article.

There are other icons available in these two files.
When using the Change Icon feature, navigate to and select either of these files.

%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll
%SystemRoot%\system32\moricons.dll

%SystemRoot% is typically C:\Windows