The folder icons showed an image that I had in one of my old website publication folders – it was a picture of a cat and every single folder icon inside windows explorer showed this cat. Other than the fact it was annoying seeing this cute little cat everywhere I roamed in explorer, I wanted my computer back!

I tried for hours to fix it and could not seem to find a solution. Then I opened process explorer and recognized the process explorer.exe had a bunch of database files in the folder called C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer hooked.

I killed explorer.exe, opened the command prompt, went to the C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer folder and renamed all the files by typing in ren *.db *.db-old.

I restarted explorer.exe and VOILA! All my folder icons in vista went back to default and new db files were created in my folder.

Thought I might share that. And if anyone reads this and has the same problem, comment and I will post more complete instructions.