Desktop Icons lost color depth

[John Marsland]

For some reason, a couple weeks ago, my desktop icons have
lost their color depth. They appear to be at 16 colors.
The 'e' for Internet Explorer is normally medium blue with
enough colors to give it a 3-D look. The Quicktime logo
should be medium/light blue with a 3-D look. Both are
solid blue (0,0,255). I have fiddled with
desktop/properties/settings. My monitor does high
color/true color. It is the same on the laptop LCD as it
is on the desk monitor. You can view the icons at
http://www.jmweb.us/icon_colors.jpg . This was captured
while the monitor was on high color (16bit). If you count
the colors, you'll see the image has 16 colors, even
though it is a 16M color JPG. My company desktop support
group wasn't able to determine anything was wrong, and i
hate to reimage the PC for crummy looking icons.

Any ideas from the team?

John

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

In

For some reason, a couple weeks ago, my desktop icons have
lost their color depth. They appear to be at 16 colors.
The 'e' for Internet Explorer is normally medium blue with
enough colors to give it a 3-D look. The Quicktime logo
should be medium/light blue with a 3-D look. Both are
solid blue (0,0,255). I have fiddled with
desktop/properties/settings. My monitor does high
color/true color. It is the same on the laptop LCD as it
is on the desk monitor. You can view the icons at
http://www.jmweb.us/icon_colors.jpg . This was captured
while the monitor was on high color (16bit). If you count
the colors, you'll see the image has 16 colors, even
though it is a 16M color JPG. My company desktop support
group wasn't able to determine anything was wrong, and i
hate to reimage the PC for crummy looking icons.

Any ideas from the team?

John

I had a similar thing happen after one of our users had been playing
around with Netmeetings settings

re

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/1018805673


try disabling the netmeeting service

 

[George Hester]

Here is my verdict. Take it as that. Just throwing it out there. Take a look at the icon size - Right-click desktop | Properties | Appearance | Item dropdown | Icon | Size. It should be at 32. If it is not what you experienced can happen.

 

[John Marsland]

Neither of the suggestions worked for me, but there was a
reference to annoyances.org. I browsed there, and got to
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/1007890983
which showed how to edit the color depth of the icons in
the registry. This was easy and painless, and fixed the
problem instantly without reboot.

Thanks for the pointer....
John

 

[George Hester]

Great thread John. Thanks.