Windows 10: How to get rid of this black square icon

A microphone-like icon appear out of nowhere on my screen. I dont even know what it means.

:)

 

Remove shortcut arrow icons (corrupts to black square)

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. Adding a new account initially seemed to work but after a few reboots it corrupted again. If I find the time I might try creating a new dll with the icon file in it, although I doubt that will help since the default dll also has a transparent icon that kept corrupting. Such a weird bug, no? It works about 25% of the time, and none of the other icons revert to a black square. I could also try making an "icon" that has one colored pixel in it, maybe it's something with how windows reads fully transparent icons, although I would expect it to get the black square always then. I'll update if I find a solution that works.

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Huzzah! Victory! At least for now. Adding 1 black pixel to the .ico file seems to have worked, 4 reboots so far and no ugly black squares. I can see the pixel if I look close but I think this is a solution I can live with. The file is here if anyone wants it.nearlyblank.ico

 

How to remove arrows from desktop icons in Windows 10 without getting black squares?

Part 1 - Remove arrows once (will break on reboot or re-login)

• Type regedit in the Windows search bar and select regedit at the top of the list.
  
• In the regedit program, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
  
• Right click on the Explorer folder, hover over New, then click Key. Name it Shell Icons and click enter or whatever to create it.
  
• Click the new Shell Icons folder. In the right pane, right click on the empty space, hover over New, and click String Value. Name it 29.
  
• Double click the String Value 29 you just created and give it the following value data: %windir%\System32\shell32.dll,-50
  
• May or may not have to reboot I forget. Check your desktop icons first to see.
  

Part 2 - Fix the black squares problem

When you reboot or login after Part 1, where the arrows once were there will now be black squares. To permanently fix the black squares problem, a short script will run automatically every time you login to fix the icons before you see them. Non-programmers can easily follow these simple steps.

• Open Notepad.
  
• Paste in the following and save it to the desktop as fixdesktopicons.bat (name not important, file extension .bat is important). Basically it deletes the corrupted part of the icon data.
  
  
• Press Windows key + r
  
• Type shell:startup and press OK. This will open a folder where you can put scripts that you want to have run automatically whenever you login.
  
• Copy the script (.bat file) from your desktop and paste it into this folder you reached by doing shell:startup.
  
• Reboot the computer for changes to take effect.
  

Now whenever you login or reboot there will be nice icons with no arrows and no black squares either.

 

Remove shortcut arrow icons (corrupts to black square)

That's brilliant NotMe! Would you be so kind as to walk a simple user like me through how to add the pixel without losing transparency or the ico format? Would MOST appreciate it. HATE those shortcut icons that mess up my custom ones.