I'm brand new to Windows 8.1 (love it BTW) and I'm seeing what seems to be "odd behavior" of desktop icons.  From time to time, all the symbols on the desktop icons start changing by themselves. They change from the normal shortcut curved arrow symbol to a large grey X, then a white checkmark in a green circle, then two small curved arrows in a circle , then a two-headed avatar symbol, then an orange dot. I'm not sure of the exact sequence but I've seen all these. Also if I hover the mouse over the icons it seems to force the symbols to change. At the moment all the odd symbols have gone. I've been told these are overlays and at least two vendors I suspected of causing this have told me they use overlays but not these symbols. I've also seen other posts that mention this might be somehow linked to my using a MS cloud account linked to OneDrive. Is there a definitive answer to this? (Please don't tell me to rebuild my icon cache.)

Hi,

Do you mean those desktop icons are always changing? In my point o view, it seems like there are third party applications leading that issue, will you please try to find out what applications did you use that may lead this issue?

You can open MSCONFIG.exe, and under Services tab, check Hide all Microsoft services to list all third party services running. You may clean boot your computer and check whether the issue can be solved, if solved, then check out what application lead to that.

In addition, please also try to use another local account to logon and check out the result.

Regards,

I'm having the same issue: suddenly instead of the regular little green arrows for shortcuts, many of time have little blue circles with circular white arrows.  Have no idea what's going on.