ALL icons missing...from entire system...!

2 days ago, I was trying to load up some vacation pics from a Cd from the DVD drive when phone rang. After returning to the 'puter, the DVD was buzzing around all over and not stopping with the screen going black. I shut everything down, retrieved the CD, and rebooted to home screen. My desktop was back with the original wallpaper I had...BUT...the icons were missing with only the text names of the shortcuts/files left behind...?! No matter where I went on my system, all the icons were gone. The system works fine. I can surf from Firefox or IE, I can open pics files and view them. I can even play CoD with no issues at all. I can open all my drives, I have 1 500gb HDD, 1 128SSD, and 1 250SSD. I can retrieve files from all these drives and open/read/view all information, but there are just no icons left. I ran sfc scannow, 3 different full virus checks, 2 different Malware scans, but still no icons, just the icon text. Windows reset as per MS instruction will not work, it says there was a problem resetting. I uninstalled Explorer and tried to rebuild the icon cache but did not work. The other tricks using command prompts from the run screen did not work either. I am retired and basically "winging" this mess, so go easy on me, as I am not a computer wiz...! I must have tried 20 different "fixes" to no avail.

Any and all help appreciated.

Laurie

Let's try this one fix bro:

1) Go to: Icon Cache - Rebuild in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums
2) Under option 1 at that page, download: Rebuild_Icon_Cache.bat
3) Run that .cmd file
4) Restart the computer. Let's hope this worked itself out

Thanks pepanee for jumpin in here, but I checked my VERY long list of fixes attempted, and that one was already tried and did not work...:-(

back to the drawing board...

Unc

Hey simrick, no restore point to go to. Tried the in-place upgrade but Windows says it could not do this...!! The stupid part is that the whole system works fine but as I said, there are NO icons to be had and the text that is left on the desktop will not show properties, so it's a real screw up for whatever is messing with the icon cache...???

It is possible that the folder that contains the icon cache (or the icon cache file itself) has blocked permissions from your account.

Let's check it out.

1) Open a File Explorer window, such as: C:\
2) In the address bar above, copy & paste this: %localappdata%
3) Press Enter
4) What happen?

In a word...nothing...! :-(

Unc

Lol? please be more specific. Did a window pop up stating that you cannot go here? Is there anything shown in that window?

In another word...nothing...and I mean nothing, nadda, zip, zero, niet...! No message, no error, not a sausage...as they say in England...!

Unc

LOL no sausage?? I was hoping your computer can pop out some Sausage out of the cd-rom drive.

Go to: C:\Users
(What is your user account called?) Double click that
Do you see "AppData" folder?