All of my Steam shortcuts are blank after resetting Windows

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

I just upgraded to a new CPU and motherboard(also to AMD from Intel), so I obviously had to reset Windows. Luckily, I have Windows installed on an SSD while things like my game libraries are on my HDD, so I just had to point my different game stores at their respective directories after reinstalling them. Unfortunately, after I reset Windows(but keeping all my personal files, obviously), all of my Steam shortcuts have turned blank. The shortcuts for Uplay, Origin, and Blizzard games are all fine, but Steam's are all white pages.

I tried verifying the integrity of some of the games, but that doesn't work. And I have so many games installed, that going through and tricking Steam into "redownloading" them(moving the game folders to a different directory, starting a download, exiting Steam, pasting them back, and then restarting Steam) will no doubt take me HOURS. I kept an image backup of my previous Windows install, so if there's any file that I could go and retrieve that'll fix the problem, I can.

[Tabs]

Do you mean they are blank as in they don't work, or blank as in the icons themselves are white and lost their iconography?

 

If it's the former, then they have likely broken due to a changed drive letter association (as Windows uses things like physical location to determine which "order" drives appear in, which will likely change between boards). If it's the latter, then you likely have a corrupt icon cache. Luckily both of these are relatively simple fixes.

[Tabs]

Also, just as an aside: you had no need to reset windows. A sysprep /generalize would have been equally as effective, but would have left you with your system in the state it was previously, but ready to have new drivers installed for the new hardware.

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

3 minutes ago, Tabs said:

Do you mean they are blank as in they don't work, or blank as in the icons themselves are white and lost their iconography?

 

If it's the former, then they have likely broken due to a changed drive letter association (as Windows uses things like physical location to determine which "order" drives appear in, which will likely change between boards). If it's the latter, then you likely have a corrupt icon cache. Luckily both of these are relatively simple fixes.

The icons still link to their respective Steam games, but their pictures are no longer showing. Again, the ones for Blizzard, Origin, and Uplay are showing 100% fine.

[Tabs]

I may have to check exactly how Steam creates it's shortcuts to be sure, but it just sounds like a broken icon cache.

 

If you close explorer, delete the iconcache_* files from C:\Users\*yourname*\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer (from a command prompt), and then restart explorer, your icons will need to regenerate.

 

If they don't get regenerated, you may want to try to copy your old icon cache files over from your backup, same basic process.

[vanished]

My advise would be just ignore the problem, or delete the shortcuts and remake them.  Should take a minute or two at most.

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

My advise would be just ignore the problem, or delete the shortcuts and remake them.  Should take a minute or two at most.

I already tried remaking them, and it still isn't working.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, fireclaw316 said:

I already tried remaking them, and it still isn't working.

Oh, that is strange...

tbh I have this same problem but I just couldn't be bothered to care about it.  I would have expected having steam regenerate a new shortcut would fix it though.

[Tabs]

Just now, fireclaw316 said:

I already tried remaking them, and it still isn't working.

I think this might actually be a bug in steam mate, or in the latest build of Windows (less likely). I just tried installing a few small games on steam - few hundred megs each - and none of the icons it created work. Steam doesn't make (and never has made) application icons - it makes url associations to itself via a steam://appid/ syntax to ensure that it gets loaded before any games are attempted to run. On my machine, only recently fresh installed, all the shortcuts it made were completely broken.

 

 

[Tabs]

Other than manually recreating each and every shortcut - either to the game exe or to the steam appid url syntax, the only other option I can think of would be to try copying the working shortcuts over from your backup. Since steam makes the shortcuts the way it does, it has to manually associate an actual icon for each url file (shortcut) it creates. With any luck all that metadata would copy over from a backup.

 

I don't know if this is 100% the case, but if you have hundreds of games, it's worth spending a few seconds trying. Manually creating every shortcut would take forever for hundreds of games, and not all of them would necessarily work depending on how the game expects to be launched.

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

5 minutes ago, Tabs said:

Other than manually recreating each and every shortcut - either to the game exe or to the steam appid url syntax, the only other option I can think of would be to try copying the working shortcuts over from your backup. Since steam makes the shortcuts the way it does, it has to manually associate an actual icon for each url file (shortcut) it creates. With any luck all that metadata would copy over from a backup.

 

I don't know if this is 100% the case, but if you have hundreds of games, it's worth spending a few seconds trying. Manually creating every shortcut would take forever for hundreds of games, and not all of them would necessarily work depending on how the game expects to be launched.

I've already tried both of those options. When I go to look at the icons saved in the Windows backup, they're all blank too. What's giving me a little hope is that I just installed a few tiny games like you did, but the icons are actually showing up for them.

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

6 minutes ago, Tabs said:

Other than manually recreating each and every shortcut - either to the game exe or to the steam appid url syntax, the only other option I can think of would be to try copying the working shortcuts over from your backup. Since steam makes the shortcuts the way it does, it has to manually associate an actual icon for each url file (shortcut) it creates. With any luck all that metadata would copy over from a backup.

 

I don't know if this is 100% the case, but if you have hundreds of games, it's worth spending a few seconds trying. Manually creating every shortcut would take forever for hundreds of games, and not all of them would necessarily work depending on how the game expects to be launched.

But, while the simple answer would be to redownload all of my games, I have a 1TB data cap(thanks, Comcast) so that would be a bad idea.

[Tabs]

Just now, fireclaw316 said:

But, while the simple answer would be to redownload all of my games, I have a 1TB data cap(thanks, Comcast) so that would be a bad idea.

There are some solutions on the web indicating that this could be an issue with the steam:// protocol being deregistered. Apparently setting windows to open url files with "internet browser" fixes the issue for people in that situation, though my association is fine so I can't verify that.

 

It's also possible that deleting the icon files from your steam folder (C:\program files (x86)\steam\steam\games in my case, different for you if you installed steam elsewhere), then doing a verify integrity check of each of your games before telling steam to create a new desktop shortcut could help.

[Kitten of the Broccoli]

OK, figured it out. I tried verifying the integrity of one of the games in my library again, refreshed the Desktop, and now the icon is showing up. So, I downloaded a script to automatically go through and do this to each game.

[Tabs]

Glad you got it fixed even if I didn't really help