All icons, throughout my system (W10), have gone but description and function seems remain

[Tommygunn]

Turned my computer back on this morning to find that all my desktop icons, most of the task bar icons and all file icons have gone, however, their function remains, as far as I can tell.
There is other weirdness in that I can right click on the icons but 'properties', for instance, will not work and when I go in 'This PC' weird black bits appear in the menu on the left. Also, when I save to my E: drive, I can actually see my file icons displayed in the 'Save as' box but not when I actually navigate to the drive, only the description below where the icons should be.

The last thing I did before turning the PC off last night was run Super AntiSpyware and Spyware Terminator and then play a bit of Battlefield 1.

The only thing I've done to try and rectify this is do a restore to two days ago but it has had no effect.

What has happened and how can I rectify it?

Thanks,
Tom.

 

[holdum323]

Hi I see you have posted your issue on other help forums. That's not a problem, but I suggest you stay with just one forum.
Give this a look by HTG. https://www.howtogeek.com/232779/how-to-rebuild-a-broken-icon-cache-in-windows-10/
Let us know how things go.

 

[senketsu]

FWIW, I've had miraculous results with the following:
1. right click on the windows symbol/button on the far left of the taskbar and select Command Prompt (admin) or PowerShell (admin)
2. type in sfc /scannow
This is the system file check command and will check the most basic Windows files and see if they are o.k. If not, it will replace the files with good ones. In any event, once it is done running it will tell you the results. If using an SSD the scan won't take long