Tip: Have pictures replaced system icons? Here's how to stop 'em...

[Upton O'Goode]

I went to do a 'secure delete' on my trash can and found that the system icon in the dialog box had been replaced by a picture of my cat... what the heck, how did that happen?

It took me a while to work out how to get rid of this and revert back to the system icon.

Answer: have the offending dialog box open, then 'force quit' the finder. This reverts everything back to default.

I hope this helps someone out.


Upton

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I went to do a 'secure delete' on my trash can and found that the system icon in the dialog box had been replaced by a picture of my cat... what the heck, how did that happen?

It took me a while to work out how to get rid of this and revert back to the system icon.

Answer: have the offending dialog box open, then 'force quit' the finder. This reverts everything back to default.

I hope this helps someone out.


Upton

I've had all kinds of weird icon problems, including disappearing icons, garbled icons, and wrong icons. The way I've solved them is to rebuild the Classic desktop file, log out and log back in. I need to test your method (force-quitting the Finder with the offending icon(s) displayed), logout and login without desktop rebuild, restarting the computer, and force quitting the Finder without the corrupt icons displayed.

 

[cb911]

i've had garbled icons as well, and some folder with my custom icons revert to the normal folder icon. this only happens to icons that are in the side-bar and top part of the Finder windows.

the funny thing is that they change back usually without me logging out or re-booting?

oh well, as long as it's not making my PB crash or cause serious problems... i guess it's not really worth complaining about.

 

[Makosuke]

The glitchy icon problem has existed since 10.3.0 and isn't fixed as of 10.3.3; it's very random, and only occurrs after your comptuer has been on for a few days, but its entirely reproduceable on a lot of machines, and apparently (haven't tried myself) isn't fixed by clean installs or anything else.

Sometimes the icons are just the wrong thing (Safari looks like a PDF or whatever), sometimes they're garbled junk, and occasionally they're just blank, but it comes and goes completely at random.

It won't however, negatively affect anything but your sanity--it's just cosmetic. And force quitting the Finder does seem to be a sure-fire way to resolve it for a while--must clear out some sort of cache that logging out and back in does not.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I've had all kinds of weird icon problems, including disappearing icons, garbled icons, and wrong icons. The way I've solved them is to rebuild the Classic desktop file, log out and log back in. I need to test your method (force-quitting the Finder with the offending icon(s) displayed), logout and login without desktop rebuild, restarting the computer, and force quitting the Finder without the corrupt icons displayed.

Okay - I just had the corrupt icon problem again. This time I tried force quitting the finder with the bad icons displayed; after opening the window that had the funny icons once Finder relaunched, everything was back to normal. Yay! 1 method tested and found to work; three more to go!

 

[Counterfit]

I've noticed this before with mounted disk image icons. It takes part of the iChat, Preview, and iSync icons and mashes them in there. Quitting (not by force thanks to Cocktail) Finder and starting it again fixes it, until it comes back x seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years/decades/centuries/millennia etc. later.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

The glitchy icon problem has existed since 10.3.0 and isn't fixed as of 10.3.3; it's very random, and only occurrs after your comptuer has been on for a few days, but its entirely reproduceable on a lot of machines, and apparently (haven't tried myself) isn't fixed by clean installs or anything else.

Sometimes the icons are just the wrong thing (Safari looks like a PDF or whatever), sometimes they're garbled junk, and occasionally they're just blank, but it comes and goes completely at random.

It won't however, negatively affect anything but your sanity--it's just cosmetic. And force quitting the Finder does seem to be a sure-fire way to resolve it for a while--must clear out some sort of cache that logging out and back in does not.

I thought that this icon bug was not 10.3-specific - I had this same trouble in Jaguar; even 10.1 was not immune. I fixed it the same way - rebuilding the Classic desktop file, then logging out and back in. The problem was FAR less frequent in Mac OS X pre-10.3, though. <edit> I seem to be getting the three types about equally - wrong icon 33.33%, garbled junk icon 33.33%, blank icon 33.33%.</edit>

 

[Counterfit]

I haven't seen it since the last time it happened.





...wait a second...

 

[Hoef]

Answer: have the offending dialog box open, then 'force quit' the finder. This reverts everything back to default.

I hope this helps someone out.

My system folder suddenly showed hideous icons...the force quit works! Being a switchers I thought I messed up the system folder within the 1st month ... Luckely we are back to normal. Tx!

 

[Elan0204]

I never had icon issues before Panther. I'm amazed that in 5 updates to Panther since its release Apple hasn't been able to fix the problem.