This was a pretty odd thing especially considering the effect. In the normal Startup or on the task-bar the icons for each program are where I put them and look and work normally.
However, on my desktop itself, they only show up as white squares. The names are there but the colored pictures are missing for all Office applications and a couple of others but many of the rest are displayed normally.
If I try to drag one out to the desktop from startup as i normally can, it look fine until I release it. As soon as it hits the desktop, it turns to a white square like the other one ad shows the (2) indicating it is a 2nd copy of the shortcut.
These odd "blank" icons do work as they should and open the programs they should open. They just don't display normally
Out of about 20 or more different systems that got the November update this is the only one having this issue, a DELL Laptop. My call to Dell Tech support only gave me the solution of a full System Restore which is a bit overkill as all I need to know is why the icons don't display properly on the desktop. Nothing else is wrong, everything works fine.
Yes, it happens especially often to "special" shortcuts that use those non-editable hardcoded paths to target applications. Such shortcuts lose their icons both on desktop and when pinned to Start Menu, displaying a white blank "document" icon instead (the very first icon in shell32.dll). And it happens to regular shortcuts as well. It does not appear to be related to Icon Cache, since rebuilding the cache does not fix it.
In my case it was Miscrosoft Visual Studio that kept losing its shortcut icon.
One workaround for this problem is open the shortcut, click "Change Icon", then manually navigate to the proper icon resource and select the proper icon. That way it seems to stick better.
What appears to be another side of this issue is the problem wit Google-Chrome-generated icons for Chrome Apps (GMail, Keep etc) when pinned to Start Menu. These shortcuts always revert to the default Chrome icon, instead of the dedicated Chrome app icon. Before 1511 it was working fine.
Thanks and will try that. I noticed another post a little further down where the user fixed the problem by editing some value in the registry. Unfortunately, that is all he posted at the end. No mention of what values were changed to fix the problem. I posted to ask him to please share this information. I wish people would share their findings in a way that would benefit all other than "i changed the registry and that fixed it".
Jaburmester I think
Solved Desktop icons not showing - Windows 10 blog
I found a work-around that does not require any registry editing.
To get a desktop shortcut with the correct icon: Open the "C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsStart MenuPrograms" folder and make all necessary desktop shortcuts using the ones located there rather than trying to use the ones that fly out in the Start Menu. All the desktop shortcuts I created starting from that folder work and look normal. The ones created from the icons in the desktop START Menu almost always ended up as a blank white square.
When dragged from the Start Menu, these shortcuts lose the information of the location for the icon and default to using ‘shell32.dll’ as the location for the correct icons which is incorrect for all of the Office 2016 programs as well as many of the “specialty” programs where the Icons are stored in custom locations.
When creating a desktop shortcut by using "C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsStart MenuPrograms" as a starting point, it retains the correct location for the icon every time.
Until I can find something better, this gets the job done in every case like this I found.
