If you use IconTweaker to customize your Windows XP icons, and after each restart Windows ‘forgets’ the customization and reverts to the default XP icons, you can not fix the problem from inside IconTweaker. The “Rebuild Icon Cache” option does not help on this. You may face the same problem not only with IconTweaker but also with similar applications, or even if you manually made some customizations of the Windows icons.

Of course, opening IconTweaker each time Windows starts and re-applying your theme, is not the best option. You need not to rebuild, but to repair the icons cache of Windows in order to have a permanent solution. A way to do this, is to download the ActivIcons freeware, which includes a “repair” option. ActivIcons can also change the default icons, but it lacks the functionality of loading and exporting themes. Whether you will replace IconTweaker with ActivIcons or not, you can install it even temporarily in order to fix your problem.

Go to ActivIcons’ Desktop Controls, change the Cache size to the maximum value (8192) and then make a Cache Repair. After this you can uninstall ActivIcons or use it instead of IconTweaker.

For a wider customization of Windows XP consider RefreshXP

Tags: activicons, Cache repair, customizations, default icons, folder icons, icons, icons cache, icons cache size, icontweaker, windows xp, windows xp icons

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