Blank Icon in Control Panel?

"TweakUI has an option to ""Rebuild icons"" - have you tried that?

Here's a standard set of icons:

If you are not missing any of the system icons above, and you don't know what the phantom icon is, then by all mean get rid of it! TweakUI can hide it so you can forget it. You could possibly succeed in a hunt for the CPL file in your Windows folder, but I don't know if deleting the CPL is enough. There could also be registry entries somewhere."

"Control Panel icons are actually programs renamed to have the extension "".CPL"". You should be able to find out what program is represented by this icon by searching your C:\Windows\System32 directory for *.cpl. Exclude the known Control Panel applets (e.g. Internet Options) and you'll have this one.

It would seem that one of these programs has no embedded icon. I would not be surprised to find that there is some program that was accidentally given a name ending in "".cpl"" but is not actually meant to be a Control Panel applet and therefore isn't working right."

"Actually I have had this happen before when I was going through another person's machine. They had contracted the Anti-Virus 2009 malware infection that was going on at the time. Several fake icons were dropped into the control panel along with a handful of popup windows in the notification area. Because you're having problems in creating a shortcut on the desktop also, I would suggest that you go through and start running some anti-virus scans, check out your applications set to run on startup and see if there are any rogue processes running on the machine.

Check out Jeff Atwoods blog post on how to hunt down and remove a virus infestation.

Good luck and hope this helps you out some."