I really messed up my icons. Is there any way to restore them back to the default version?
Try changing color depth from 32 bit to 16 bits and then back.
Already did. The thing is that I used a program that changed the icons to something else, so the icon paths were changed.
Oh. Well fiddle a bit more with your program then. Or get rid of it. 
Wow, I’m stupid. I just fixed it.
Looks like you’re running windows XP, missing icons are not hard to fix, because microsoft hasn’t deleted all the nessesary menus like they did in vista and 7.
Just right click on the desktop, click properties, in the Desktop tab click Customize Desktop, then select the missing icons and click “Restore Default”.
Then press Start, right click on Outlook and press “Remove from this list” (I doubt you’re using outlook, if you are, you shouldn’t be)
The only program I know that can easily manage all your system icons is IconPackager, you could try installing that and apply the windows default package and see if it restores your original icons.
At least in XP you can change the icon for My Computer and the likes from desktop properties and customize desktop.
This default/missing icon thing is my only complaint regarding windows 7. No wait… the icon thing and the permissions/owner thing. Those two are the only complaints I have.
What did you DO!!!
Also a quick way to repair the missing icons is to go to the remove programs list and in the uninstall wizard there is usually an option to “repair”. This should force the program to recopy the ico files and re-enable them.
One day all the icons were fine, the next day they werent. Who knows what did it. I installed, patched, updated, re-cached and tweaked everything I could think of. And let me tell you, “windows 7 icon problem” and "Windows 7 how do i change my icons?" brings up tons of ways to fix it, but none of them are easy or a sure win. Part of the problem is windows 7 does not give you a ‘change icon’ capability in your properties settings. I have since fixed the problem by installing an icon changer, but to be honest that is NOT acceptable as far as I am concerned.
But to answer the question… I have a sneaky suspicion that moving my start menu around as well as changing ownership of the c drive may have exacerbated the problem.
Hey Catz, you can y’know when you say you hate the permissions thing, I’m gonna go out on limb and say you mean the way it asks for your permission all the time to run programs and whatnot?
You can switch that off. Type UAC into the search at the start menu, then click the “change user account control settings” and drag the slider down to the bottom.
If that ain’t what you mean, I’m sowwy fo bein stoopid 
That didnt fix mah problem. The problem I got all the time is “you do not have access” or “you do not have permission” blah blah blah… And apparently they ARE two different things. grrrr. It is my computer and only one user is on it. The default should be that everyone is the owner and has access and has permissions. If there is a reason there needs to be privacy settings, it should be something you set up. Not an automatic. Mr. Gates made something that should have been easy a hard thing to manage for 80% of his users.
/rage
I fixed it somehow, but am not sure I remember how. I think I went in and changed the c drive and the e drive to give full access and permissions to everything for all users.
Yeah, I’ve had trouble with Windows 7 and the icons, the search function in the start menu, when you search, it only ever comes up with this. “programs” without an icon.
Stupid. D: