If the Windows 10 Recycle Bin icon refuses to refresh (fixed)


What a shame! Each time I emptied the Recycle Bin on Windows 10, the icon refused to refresh and the bin still appeared as full of trash, until I pressed F5 to update its state manually! The problem in my case was fixed in an easy and safe way, you can try and see if it works also for you.

Open your registry editor and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\DefaultIcon

In the address above don’t be confused by the long-number value; the particular CLSID tree contains only one value that starts with 64. In “DefaultIcon” you will see at the right three entries, the top one named “Default”, then “empty”, and “full”. Just check if currently your “Default” value is the same with “full” and double click to change that. “Default” and “empty” should have identical values. They both should have the value %SystemRoot%\System32\imageres.dll,-55

Yet, if you use custom icons, your problem can be solved by just defining an index number beside your icon value. For instance, if your empty icon is anycustomempty.ico just change this to anycustomempty.ico,0. Make sure again that empty and default are identical, and also add a zero index to your full icon, e.g. changing anycustomfull.ico to anycustomfull.ico,0