Danger - don't use Tweak UI's "rebuild icons"
When I reinstall XP (which I do too often) I always round up my customizations (which I can do in under 10 minutes blindfolded... sigh) with a bunch of tweaks inside of Tweak UI. Normally I never fuss with that "Repair" area, but for some odd reason I decided to click "Rebuild Icons" this time around. It didn't appear to do anything at first until I connected to my machine via Remote Desktop (which is how I connect to most of my machines...)
It had somehow messed up and all my icons in the taskbar, "Save As..." dialogs, desktop, etc. were all in 16 bit color. I even tried installing XP SP3 RC to see if it helped. I followed numerous suggestions about "tricking" Windows into re-caching the icons, deleting the icon cache, etc. Nothing fixed it. Finally, I came across a forum post (well, actually it was the first result in Google but this particular suggestion was the last one I tried) that had the magic fix. It's a simple .reg file that resets some icon settings somewhere. It was the only thing that seemed to do the trick, and I have decided to host a copy of it just in case that link ever goes dead. So, thank you to "wissnx01" at That Computer Guy's forums.
To fix the issue, download this zip file and merge the .reg file inside of it. Reboot (or maybe even just logout and log back in) and voila. Fixed.
Thx, this saved me some headache.
I did the same exact thing when I installed Windows. Ussually don't mess with that page of TweakUI but clicked Repair anyways. Thanks a lot!
I thought the problem was with Remote Desktop since when I logged in locally, the icons were fine, but regardless: this did the trick. Thank you kind sir.
Thank you so much, this was driving me crazy!!! 🙂
Thanks a lot, this solved also my problem (did the same thing with TweakUi). From looking at that registry file I thought that only resetting the Shell Icon Size to 16 would do the trick. And it did!
In Previous post I said Shell Icon Size, but the should be Shell Icon BPP.