Fix Icons is an experimental utility to fix some small, irritating problems that can sometimes happen with the desktop database. Sometimes an application may lose its icons. Or the icons may look OK, but you cannot drag and drop documents on top of the application that you know you should be able to. Or you might get a new version of the application, which has some new icons, but the Finder continues to display the old ones.
The usual way to fix these problems is to rebuild the desktop database. However, this is a drastic operation, which can be quite time-consuming on a large hard disk. It causes you to lose any comments you may have entered into “Get Info” windows. And it may cause you to lose other icons.
Fix Icons offers a less upsetting alternative. It lets you open any file which has a suite of icons associated with it: this might be an application, in which case the icons are associated with the types of documents you can double-click to open with that application, but it needn’t be. Fix Icons will refresh the desktop database with the information about the associated icons and document types, without affecting anything else. You may need to quit and restart the Finder in order to see the effect of the change, but this is still better than having to rebuild the desktop database.
If all goes well, you will not see any messages. Sometimes Fix Icons will report certain situations that, while not necessarily bad, are nevertheless things you might like to know about. For example, there might be more than one copy of an application on your disk. Or there might be a “dangling” entry in the desktop database, pointing to a copy of the application that no longer exists.
Note: Fix Icons requires System 7.0 or later. It will only work with volumes that support the Desktop Manager. This includes network volumes, and disks larger than 2MB. It doesn’t include 800K and 1.4MB floppy disks. If you have AppleScript, you will find that Fix Icons is both scriptable and recordable. In fact, there are one or two additional, even more experimental functions that you can only get at via AppleScript (open its dictionary to find out what they are).
Like I said above, Fix Icons is an experimental utility. It doesn’t do anything really dangerous, but there is still the chance that it may conflict with some Apple system software extensions that I haven’t tried yet. Use at your own risk. If you hit any problems, let me know.
