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Each time:

  • any program opens "Open", "Save" or "Save as" dialog (i.e. browser, Word etc.) or
  • I start any program which main operation is to handle files (i.e. Notepad++, IrfanView etc.)

my desktop's and quick-launch bar's icons are refreshed. I.e. I can clearly see that they all turn blank / empty and then "slowly" (noticeable) are being refreshed back to their original look / state.

Opening open/save dialog or running a program is delayed until this "refresh" is done and thus such simple (and so far -- quick) operations like saving or opening a file or running certain apps becomes quite lengthy.

Because described behavior is triggered by many different programs (that all have only one thing in common -- an attempt to save or open a file) I cannot provide any more details.

Is this situation known to someone? Is it documented somewhere? Is there any fix to this problem, except a well known -- "re-install Windows 7 from scratch"?

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  • 1
    See this link, it is for a different issue but yours may be related to the icon cache so the 3 step fix in this article may help you also..support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2396571/…
    – Moab
    Commented Jun 11, 2018 at 12:42
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    I have also seen this be a result of out-dated video drivers so you make check that as well.
    – EBGreen
    Commented Jun 11, 2018 at 12:43
  • Also if the other recommendations don't resolve, consider running from elevated command prompt SFC /SCANNOW and also doing a chkdsk /F /R /X... Also, sign on with a different user account and see if it occurs with that account, and if not, you may just have a corrupt user account profile and should rebuild a new one and get your data and settings transferred to a new one potentially.
    – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style
    Commented Jun 11, 2018 at 12:55
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    I see the same thing in Windows 10, so it's not being given any priority by Microsoft, presumably because they regard it as a cosmetic problem.
    – AFH
    Commented Jun 11, 2018 at 13:01
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    @AFH I wouldn't call "cosmetic" a problem that significantly (2-3 seconds delay) slows down nearly each open/save + run application operations in my computer.
    – trejder
    Commented Jun 12, 2018 at 13:35

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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As per this forum, try

  1. Settings > Personalisation > Change the color settings (turn off the auto accent) and/or remove the slide show
  2. Remove Windows Media Player "Add or remove Windows features > Media Player" (this worked for me)
  3. Other software mentioned that could effect it
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I think I solved this problem. I found two solutions or workarounds that kinda work:

The first one is if run your program as admin, the taskbar icons don't refresh in those situations. The problem is that you have to set it individually, to mark that you wish to run that program as admin one by one.

The second one is... this problem seems to have something to do with file type associations, especially if you associate some file types with some legacy software (for instance: associating your MP3 files with winamp), so my advice would be to reset the preferences and to prefer associate file types with more modern software. I have so problems associating video files with media player classic as well.

Other thing I think it might help is to go to "Folder Options" and redefine/set a new visualization mode and go to "apply to folders" and set it. Apparently this might ended up reseting folder configurations and kill and the bug.

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  • I have upvoted your answer to thank you for your time, effort and research, but unfortunately I cannot accept it, because there is no way that I can review it right now. For past 2 months I am running Windows 10 on all my devices and I don't have access to any computer still running Windows 7, sorry.
    – trejder
    Commented Oct 29, 2019 at 8:58
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    No problem. I was having this issue on windows 10 and decided to post this, it could help someone anyway.
    – Estranhosidade
    Commented Nov 1, 2019 at 6:19

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