Black Icons on Desktop

from Stardock Forums

A weird issue that I've been trying to figure out for a while but can't seem to get to the bottom of, but for a few months now (starting while I was using Fences 4 and going into Fences 5 now), when my icons refresh, they occasionally get corrupted and "disappear" before turning into black boxes when they refresh another time.

I tried rebuilding my icon cache, scanning for file corruptions, updating Windows, updating my graphics driver, and so forth, but I keep thinking that its a Fences issue because the icon corruption only affects the icons that are immediately visible on my desktop. Icons that are accessed by scrolling down within my face seem to be unaffected. Occasionally, a screen refresh will will make them reappear, but so will restarting explorer.exe.

Its a very niche issue and I can't seem to put my finger on what's causing it, but I figured Fences would be a good place to start asking questions. Has this affected anyone else by any chance?

fences
6,116 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Yikes! Well, no way to prove a negative – but, you can try using the option in the bottom of the Welcome screen to disable Fences, reboot, and from then on Fences will not be loaded at all.

Since it's intermittent, disabling doesn't make Fences the smoking gun, but perhaps you'll see it happens anyways and can narrow out. Or, find some correlation.

We don't however do anything to modify the icon image list in any way however, so, this would be the first time in the 15yrs or so of the program that I have heard of this one 😮‍💨. Thanks for letting us know how it goes.

 

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Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

I disabled Fences to try and isolate the issue after reinstalling it last night and the issue happened again, so you're probably right that it isn't Fences that's causing it. I do suspect now that PowerToys may be at play. Not sure if its doing it on its own or if its not playing nice with Fences, but I'll try to isolate some of the most likely modules to if the issue repeats at all.

Thanks for the help!

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Small update: so since posting this, I've played around with a number of programs and I think I may have figured out a partial solution. Still not sure what's causing it per se, but I've disabled Pages within Fences and I haven't had this issue crop up over the last few days, which sounds promising. I guess the functionality of Pages wasn't playing nice with something on Windows' back end or one of my background programs. 

At least it's something. Fingers crossed the solution sticks!