Is it ever risky to delete and rebuild the icon and thumbnail caches?

Question

I'm currently writing a batch script to programmatically change the icon of folders via their desktop.ini file. The script works, but it takes a few minutes for it to take effect, presumably due to the icon/thumbnail cache being rebuilt. I'm considering writing in behaviour to delete the icon and thumbnail caches files manually, forcing them to rebuild so that the script's changes show as immediately as possible, but before I do, I want to make sure that doing so won't cause any adverse effects. Could it?

Answer 1

The only side-effect that you might see is that Windows would take longer to process media file previews in a folder because of the missing caches.

In fact Windows even include a feature to turn off caching.

See this article for more details

From the above article I would also like to highlight that different versions of Windows stores the caches at different locations. Also note that Windows treats network drives differently than local drives.