About 10 days ago I suddenly lost all folder and drive icons in third party applications. At the time this happened I did not install any new software. The last install of new software was UT3 using Impulse, which happened about 5 days prior. The computer has been rebooted several times since the install of UT3 before the icons dissappeared.




Current situation:

The following icons do not show up in all third-party applications but show up normally in all Window components (see picture).

- drives - I have changed the icon of my C-drive with IconPackager just shortly after I lost the icons.
- folders - notice how the one that is clicked/highlighted (Users) shows correctly in FreeCommander? This happens to all folders I click on. The Boot-folder shows up correctly all the time without me having to click on it.
- ini-files
- txt-files

This goes for all icon-sizes, not just the small ones.



My System:

Vista64bit Ultimate SP1 up-to-date, double-boot with Ubuntu on second physical Hard-drive but Boot-loader (GRUB) on Vista drive.
Kaspersky InternetSecurity 2009



This is what I have done to solve the problem so far (not successful):

- used Revo uninstaller to uninstall - reboot - re-install FreeCommander: It was only then that I realized that all the other third-party apps had lost their icons too.

- downloaded and installed the trial-version of TotalCommander to check whether a newly installed programm would suffer from the same problem: it did.

- used the 'Rebuild Icon Cache' the 'Rebuild icons' and 'Rebuild shell-icons' in IconPackager. The shell icon rebuild didn't seem to do anything at all (it asked me to choose the programs, but when I clicked on ok I had no feedback what-so-ever and no apparent HD-activity)

- Uninstalled IconPackager - rebooted - re-installed IconPackager all using Impulse and used the three 'rebuild'-buttons again.

- used the ODNT-zapper to uninstall IconPackager and rebuilt my IconCache manually by deleting IconCache.db (and emptying the Recycle Bin), and rebooting. (strangely enough; IconPackager showed as still being installed in Revo-uninstaller after that, so I uninstalled it again from within Revo) - I had never installed a stand-alone Version of IconPackager?

- checked file-associations in Vista for the affected files/folders. They seem to be ok.

- added FreeCommander and other third-Party apps to the exclusion/ignore-list of Kaspersky. Unloaded Kaspersky (and checked in Taskmanager that it was really gone). Note: when browsing from within Kaspersky itself, the Icons are gone too!

- uninstalled SP1 - rebooted - re-installed SP1: I did that in the hopes that a corrupt shell32.dll would be the culprit (SP1 replaces/updates shell32.dll).



The following Programs auto-update on my system:

Kaspersky
Impulse



What could possibly prevent all third-party applications from accessing shell32.dll correctly? Please, please tell me it's a service that has stopped running, or something similar easy to fix.
I really don't want to do a complete format - re-install of Vista, as I have just spend most of a week downloading and installing UT3 (and no, I do not yet trust the archive feature of Impulse).

Anyone have any ideas???