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33 Responses to “Strange icon in System Preferences”

1. Joel Heflin said: Fri, 22 September 2006 at 07:04

   I had the exact same problem. It bugged me for a while but I never really looked for a solution. I had another problem occur which caused me to archive/install OSX so that fixed it. Does anyone know what causes the icon problem?

2. Jay Hill said: Mon, 16 October 2006 at 09:12

   This tip worked great–thanks a million!

3. Manny said: Sat, 21 October 2006 at 05:57

   I have a similar problem but this solution has not solved it. There are several icons missing from my System Preferences. The following icons show up as a generic Sysem icons (the apple switch): Accounts, Date & Time, Startup Disk, Universal Access. When I click on the them, the new pane is empty.

   Does anyone have a fix for this?

4. Justin Rutledge said: Fri, 27 October 2006 at 09:04

   I had the exact problem shown above this morning. I am running mac os 10.4.8. I just wanted to say thanks for a solution to this problem! It was driving me nuts.

5. Michael Montgomery said: Fri, 27 October 2006 at 09:10

   Thanks for this fix, such a small problem to be driving me crazy.

6. jesse said: Fri, 3 November 2006 at 08:37

   manny, delete your com.apple.systempreferences.plist from /library/preferences

7. Daniel said: Mon, 6 November 2006 at 09:09

   Worked! Thanks a ton!

8. Cal said: Thu, 16 November 2006 at 08:53

   Thanks very much for this guide, it helped immensely – is there any reason as to why this icon appeared in the first place?

9. James said: Sun, 26 November 2006 at 12:25

   Thanks. This was bugging me for a long time. I lived with it, but it was an eyesore. Now I’m happy as can be!

10. tayker said: Sun, 3 December 2006 at 15:00

    Thanks, I just had the same problem today.

11. Ben said: Sun, 10 December 2006 at 15:06

    I love you.

12. J_ said: Sun, 10 December 2006 at 17:00

    Thanks. Worked for me. Great help.

13. Johs said: Sun, 7 January 2007 at 07:58

    Thanks a bunch! :)

14. Jon said: Sat, 20 January 2007 at 05:09

    Thanks,
    This had been bugging all day …. I like to keep my mac nice and tidy

15. ml said: Mon, 12 March 2007 at 14:23

    thanks sooo much, been bugging me!!

16. John Sawyer said: Tue, 10 April 2007 at 12:50

    I had the same problem, but found I had to restart my Mac before the change would take effect–just relaunching System Preferences after deleting the cache files didn’t do the trick until the restart.

    Deleting other cache files can fix other problems, as you would suspect–I use Tiger Cache Cleaner (TCC)’s “deep cleaning” option. Current versions (it’s at 3.2.9) will clear caches on volumes other than your startup volume too, so if your Mac has a startup problem caused by cache files, and you don’t know where the problem cache files are on your drive, this lets you start up from a different drive and use TCC to clear the caches. You could manually trash the cache files, but TCC is more thorough than most people are likely to be in hunting down all the places where cache files reside.

17. John Sawyer said: Tue, 10 April 2007 at 12:54

    By the way, that odd lightswitch icon is the icon you used to see for a preferences pane when you look at it in the Finder, in its folder at System/Library/PreferencesPanes. Somewhere along the line, Apple gave these prefpanes Finder icons that look like their System Preferences icons, but if you drag a prefpane to the Dock, it still takes on the old generic lightswitch icon, with a tiny representation of its System Preferences icon in its lower left corner. Someone at Apple had some odd ideas one day about how to handle icons for these items.

18. Will said: Mon, 16 April 2007 at 11:29

    omg Thank you so much for posting this!

19. Peter Halkmund said: Sat, 21 April 2007 at 21:23

    yihaa! :)

20. Gordon Barnes said: Wed, 25 April 2007 at 00:01

    Brilliant, just solved my problem. Many thanks!! G

21. chuck n said: Wed, 16 May 2007 at 09:35

    Thanks, they went screwy on my today, and your tip fixed it right up.

22. Jonathan Parr said: Fri, 18 May 2007 at 00:01

    Thanks for this tip - it worked perfectly. It had been driving me mad.

23. ennonymous said: Tue, 5 June 2007 at 22:12

    Thanks a lot, worked fine.

24. Jake said: Fri, 8 June 2007 at 12:45

    I have had the same messed up ‘Speech’ icon for some time now, and am just now getting around to fixing it. However, I have searched manually and with Spotlight and have been unable to find the anywhere. I was wondering if there was any other way to reset the cache.

25. RodP said: Wed, 20 June 2007 at 14:09

    Wahoooooo! Thank you! :)

26. chris said: Fri, 13 July 2007 at 07:52

    This may sound odd… but when I traveled to the folder listed above, those files simply were not there. The issue is the exact issue in the picture above. Any help is greatly appreciated!!!

27. chris said: Fri, 13 July 2007 at 08:46

    ohhh, nevermind. They were in a different library> caches folder. Yea, thanks a billion for the tip! worked like a charm!

28. fozz said: Mon, 30 July 2007 at 01:52

    Thanks it worked a treat..

29. Mark said: Mon, 30 July 2007 at 13:32

    Thanks for the tip. I never would have found it.

30. Nick said: Fri, 31 August 2007 at 07:10

    Thanks for tip. It was easy to find, even easier to implement and — voilà — the icon is back. Thanks!

31. Andrew said: Sat, 15 September 2007 at 00:39

    thanks! this tip is worth its digital weight in gold.

    but why does it affect the speech icon specifically?

32. Bob said: Tue, 18 September 2007 at 04:03

    Thanks a million! I was so annoyed by that problem.

33. John C. Worsley said: Thu, 4 October 2007 at 10:51

    Thanks very much! Didn’t want to have to track that one down myself.

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