Desktop icons displaying as blank document

The other day I changed some html docs to open with my text editing program rather than the Safari and clicked the Apply to All button. Instead of displaying the text program's icon, as they always have in the past (especially since many were originally created by the program to start with), they lost the Safari icon they had and now simply display as blank pages. As long as the file opens with a double click in the program it is supposed to open with I wouldn't worry about the icon failure.

I suppose one could try cleaning all sorts of caches, but I don't intend to bother. This seems to be a new Finder glitch, I hadn't seen it before 10.4.5. What you probably remember from OS 9 was a lost icon problem that was a good indicator that it was time to rebuild the Desktop. If you run Classic you can still do this, for Classic, in the System Prefs->Classic. It does nothing for OS X, and there is no such thing in X.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

One thing that could be causing this is corrupt Launch Services. To fix them, open the terminal, and type the following commands:

cd ~/Library/Preferences/
rm LS*
rm .LS*

Then use the Apple menu to log out, and back in.

Good Luck.

I had a similar problem recently - also with textedit-associated files. (plists for me)

As I recall, forcing the re-association via get info - open with-other & choosing textedit again + apply to all solved this for me.... although I may have copied the correct icon to a single file first, then done the above via that file.

I presume this would help the OP too.

I did a little experimenting, some of the html files in a folder were sporting the proper icon, some a blank, but all SAY they are Tex-Edit documents when listed with a Kind column, and all open in Tex-Edit when double clicked. I tried selecting the blank ones and assigning them back to Safari. Next time I started up and looked all were sporting the Safari icon. Changed them back to Tex-Edit, whereupon some got the icon and some displayed the blank. Hmm. Took a look at a sample with SuperGetInfo, which will display the Type and Creator and allow you to edit it. Discovered that those with a Type of TEXT and the Creator code for Tex-Edit were displaying the correct icon, but those where the Type and Creator code were missing were displaying the blank icon. So I think the LaunchServices database is just fine, the problem is some new Finder glitch. Like I mentioned above, the Finder used to always display the default file icon for the program you had assigned to the file, regardless of what (if any) the original Type and Creator were. And I did try selecting one of the blanks and looking at it with GetInfo, and it does indeed have Tex-Edit assigned to it as the default. Adding the TEXT and Creator code in SuperGetInfo does cause the file to immediately sport the correct icon. Kinda annoying, but not worth fighting it since I regularly change html files back and forth, depending on what I'm doing.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

mine were all set to textedit as default too - just the default icon was a blank document. (same with another app & different file types).

As I said - ignoring the 'correct' already set 'open with' and changing it to what it already was.... did fix my issues.