Windows 10 has a rather annoying bug: the Start menu displays a wrong icon regarding USB devices. How to fix the problem
Nth post-update bug for Windows 10 but, at least this time, it’s nothing serious: user data is not at risk, but icons are. The defect reported by several users in recent days, in fact, concerns a curious error in displaying the icons of removable USB devices.
In practice, when we connect a flash drive or other external storage devices to our PC or laptop, for a few minutes the correct icon is displayed, different for each type of device. After a while, however, inexplicably the icon changes and a generic one is displayed in File Explorer. This creates confusion for the user, but luckily the drive letter doesn’t change and the data is still accessible without any problems. A bug, minor, then, that plagues Windows 10 from version 1903 (May Update) onwards.
Windwos 10 and the crazy icons: what happened
From the discussion that has been generated online after the first reports, first on the blog of Gunter Born of BornCity.com and then on the Microsoft Answer Community, it would seem that this problem has popped up like a mushroom in recent days. Numerous are the reports, so it’s not just a few hardware configurations that create the bug, but a problem related to Windows. According to what has been reconstructed in the last few hours, the heart of the problem lies in Microsoft’s servers: if the option “Do you want to automatically download custom apps and icons from manufacturers available for your devices?” is enabled in Windows, then the operating system connects to Microsoft’s servers to download the custom icon. It has always worked, but as of a few days ago it no longer works because, most likely, Microsoft has changed something on its servers and Windows responds by loading a generic icon.
Crazy icons on Windows 10: how to fix
The solution to this headache didn’t come from Microsoft, which hasn’t fixed the bug yet, but from Twitter where Seriously Senpai explained that we just need to go to the %PROGRAMDATA%MicrosoftWindowsDeviceMetadataCachedmrccache folder and look for the last modified folder (they are all language folders). Then we have to sort these folders by date to find the one with the recently modified metadata (we also recognize it because it has the same icon as the USB storage device). At this point we just need to delete this folder to remove all metadata and icons related to the USB storage device: usually this is enough to make Windows 10 load the correct icon.