Windows XP's Powertoys are indeed very powerful (particularly TweakUI), but sometimes changing settings in TweakUI may cause the icons to take a much less colorful, and quite ugly look, a la Windows 95 or NT.

Now this doesn't always happen, and if it doesn't, then you needn't worry. However, if it does, there are two simple ways to fix them.

First you can try the Repair icons feature within TweakUI itself. Its procedure flushes the cache and reload the icons. This can be done as seen in the screenshot here:



If that does not work, don't despair. This probably means that the registry settings for the icons was changed.

A .reg fix can be downloaded from Kellys Korner or you can attempt to do it yourself.

If you choose the latter, simply go open up Regedit ( Start -> Run -> regedit ), then nagivate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\desktop\WindowMetrics

And change the following keys to:

"Shell Icon BPP"="16"
"Shell Icon Size"="32"

You can either simply refresh the desktop, log off and on again, or reboot to see if the changes take.

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by C0deZer0 edited by MSeng
last modified: 2003-09-09 20:44:07