Why does Windows 10 incorrectly report that "The file example.exe contains no icons"?

Question

I have shortcuts/links for several standalone/portable applications on my desktop. Up until last week, these shortcuts all had their own icons (i.e. the default icons for their respective applications). However, several of them are now showing the "blank page" icon typically used by Windows when no icon is present. This also extends to the application/exe themselves, not just the shortcuts.

When I inspect one of these .lnk files with a missing icon and go to Properties > Change Icon, I am told "The file example.exe contains no icons". This is despite the fact that the icon for example.exe is still being shown on the taskbar and properties window when it is being used. It's just not showing up on the desktop shortcut, or when I view the application itself with explorer.

If I copy or move the application to any other directory, the icon will show up with no issues. I can then make a new shortcut to the application in its new location, and the icon works correctly. But once I move it back to the original location, or make a new shortcut to said location, the icon stops working again.

Finally, I used ResourcesExtract on one of the problematic applications, and it extracted the .ico just fine.

Can anyone offer a possible explanation for this bizarre behaviour?

EDIT: The issue causing the icons to not show up properly for the application when viewed in Explorer, and the shortcuts/links on the desktop, ended up being separate from and unrelated to the one mentioned in the title.

For those interested, it had to do with the permissions of the folder the applications were stored in (in my case, C:\bin). I was able to resolve this with PowerShell by entering an administrator prompt and using Get-Acl 'C:\Program Files\' | Set-Acl C:\bin\.

Since my primary question remains unanwered, I'm leaving this as unresolved for now.

Answer 1

I don't know what is broken, but the message is entirely normal: Windows has attempted to extract an icon, has failed, and has given you an error message that some developer somewhere, at some time, thought was the shortest, simplest, most helpful message that was likely to be correct.

"No icon was extracted". Most likely reason: "No icon was present". Most likely to be helpful "No icon was present". Like this answer, unlikely to help you at all: "Maybe something is broken somewhere"

This has always been the case. In 1995, we'd get "out of memory" errors. It never meant "out of memory", what it always meant was "attempt to get memory failed".