Adobe PDF icon disappeared?

Question

Starting last week I've noticed that all my PDF files now have a generic white document as an icon instead of the original Adobe PDF icon.

I've reinstalled Adobe Reader, repaired it, and have had no success in getting the original icon back. The generic document icon is really getting into my head now... it's just... generic.

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

You could try to fix incorrectly shown icons, and rebuild the icon cache. Assuming you're on Windows Vista or 7, the following links include the details:

• Forcing a refresh of the icon cache
• Rebuilding the icon cache database

Answer 2

I believe the underlying reason is the Adobe MSI installer breaks Microsoft's rules for creating a Windows installer package. Under the documentation, we read:

Icon files that are associated with shortcuts must be in the EXE binary format and must be named such that their extension matches the extension of the target.... For example, if a shortcut is to point to a resource having the key file Red.bar, then the icon file must also have the extension .bar.

(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa369210(v=vs.85).aspx)

In the MSI installer for Adobe Reader DC / 2015 / 2017 we see the 'Icon' table entries, all of which have the extension '.ico' by default:

If you edit the MSI with Orca and do a find/replace to change '.ico' to '.exe' on every relevant table, and then repair / reinstall the MSI, the problem does not reoccur. It would be helpful for Adobe to fix this in the MSI directly for everyone in another release.