Bizarre OSX Icon Behavior

February 20, 2005 5:27 PM

Why are some of my icons in OSX being randomly replaced with icons of unrelated things?

So right now under "rustcellar's Computer", "Macintosh HD" and "Network" have icons that are mostly blank, except they have the green circle that says "IM" in it that appears on the AIM application icon when a new IM arrives. Totally bizarre! In list view (small icons), the "Network" icon is a small unlocked lock, and the "Macintosh HD" icon is something barely discernable. Inside my hard drive, the OS9 Desktop alias looks like a folder with the IM green circle emblazoned on it, but a few days ago it was a folder icon with a standard hard drive icon almost completely obscuring it on top of it (not two items! the two images combined into one icon!). I can't understand how this could possibly be happening. Thoughts?

posted by rustcellar to computers & internet (8 comments total)

This happens to me once in a while. The only way I can get it to go back is to logout and log back in again.

I notice it happens more when I have the system up for longer periods of time (weeks without logging out / shutting down.) That might just be a correlation, not a cause.
posted by neustile at 5:32 PM on February 20, 2005

Ditto what neustile said. Logging back in again takes care of the problem. Damned if I know what's causing it, but at least it doesn't seem to be serious.
posted by mcwetboy at 6:18 PM on February 20, 2005

I asked about this on Macintouch a couple of months ago. I got some helpful responses. In short, simple delete the contents of [username]/Library/Icons (not the folder, just the contents), and Bob's your uncle.
posted by waldo at 6:48 PM on February 20, 2005

Semi-ditto what neustile said, in that I've *also* seen it happen when I've hammered the memory usage and ended up with a lot of swap files, even if my uptime has been merely a few hours.
posted by kimota at 7:39 PM on February 20, 2005

This just happened on our server at work last week and has been getting worse. Rebooting, fixing permissions, etc haven't helped; it seems to be spreading. Happens only with documents, not applications or other items ... Weird. Now its maybe 2,500 out of 700,000 documents on the server from what we can tell (very rough estimate).
posted by luriete at 9:25 PM on February 20, 2005

Relaunching the Finder worked. From luriete's comment and the Macintouch responses waldo linked to, it seems like there might be two different phenomena. This doesn't seem to happen to documents for me.
posted by rustcellar at 9:35 PM on February 20, 2005

luriete, this might be more relevant to your situation.
posted by kimota at 8:32 PM on February 22, 2005

Thanks Kimota!
posted by luriete at 9:19 PM on February 22, 2005