Why are the icons in My computer all nearly alike now?

All of them (except the folders) now look like little blue pieces of paper with a very tiny little picture of the icon that used to be there inside.

I can't visually tell them apart now. This makes it much harder to find the file I want easily.

In addition, My Computer won't let me change the icons to the old ones.

I don't care that the file is a "document." I need to be able to tell at a glance what KIND of document it is. All I see for all of the following kinds of files is a blue piece of paper with a folded down edge, and a little red-orange smudge inside:

bmp, gif, htm, html, jpg

The smudges are different, but not different enough to tell at a glance which kind of file it is. This makes it much harder to do my work. Whoever thought this up deserves a kick into next week.

What's going on?

make sure that your using a .ico file

I am trying to use the icons that used to be displayed. So they are definitely .ico files.

When I use "Change Icon" in Properties in My Computer, it goes through the motions, but the icons do not change in the File Types list.

Also, my computer suddenly changed from defaulting to Firefox to defaulting to IE at the same time. This all happened the day after MS upgraded IE.

well that sounds very odd i'm not sure why it does that. one time i had to run my whole computer from the command prompt for a awhile because explorer didn't want to process. i'll look into it and let you know man

Still waiting for a reason and a solution.

I still need an answer for this. It is slowing down my work.

alright well just make firefox your default again by going to tools options and the main tab. as far as the icons go did you check your system for virus'? try using avg it seems to be the most on top of things

Let's try changing just one, say jpgs:
Right-click any jpg
Select "open With"
Select "Choose Program"
Select the Program
Check "always use..."
See if the icon changes
You may need to reboot.

Im still trying to figure out what file icon you are talking about ,you say in my computer ,do you mean when you open MYComputer ,or just in general, in my computer !anywhere on the hardrive you look .if its what it think, then you may have install a new program that took over as the main program to use to open these file types .instead of maybe a few different programs that once did it ,therefor using many different icons .make sense!

I already fixed the default browser problem the day it happened. I just mentioned it because both effects started together.

This happened right after an IE update from Microsoft. Nothing else was done to the computer when this happened.

These are the icons I see in My Computer and My Documents.

The icons used to look like these:



Now they look like these (click to open):



The original icon seems to have been shrunk and enveloped inside an image of a piece of paper that says "this is a document."

As you can see, it is very hard to tell the file types apart at a glance.

The strange thing about this this is that these icons do not appear in the list of icons that come with the programs. I don't know where they come from,. But I can't change the icons back to the ones that come with the programs. It goes through the motions, but the icons do not change.