Windows 7 Folders/Icons Flashing/Flickering

Pretty much what the titles says. I only noticed it last night when I had a folder open (Not full screen) and was flicking through it, that all the items on my desktop was flickering when I went into another folder.

That was late at night with my PC being on along time. Its happened today, but in a shorter amount of time. I have however been playing some games, so maybe that could be related with it?

I do know that stopping, then re-starting explorer.exe fixes it. Just curious if anyone else has seen this or experienced it?


This is mostly the best example I can give which I found, just that it does it when I'm going through folders. But its not just constant, so I guess it is a game/program I opened at the time causing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF6Sp9EM-i0

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Run that and disable any shell extensions you have installed that it marks as pink - does your problem go away? If so it's just a case of going through and enabling them one by one to see which one is causing the issue.

Looks like your icon cache refreshing due to low memory. Your icon cache might be full if you have left your system on for a good while.

Try flushing the explorer icon cache from a command prompt. Type C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache at the prompt. Command prompt is located under Start > Program Files > Accessories.

A system reboot will also flush the cache.

The batch file from here has always worked for me.