Silvermac

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?

This tip worked great–thanks a million!

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?

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.

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

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

Worked! Thanks a ton!

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

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!

Thanks, I just had the same problem today.

I love you.

Thanks. Worked for me. Great help.

Thanks a bunch! :)

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

thanks sooo much, been bugging me!!

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.

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.

omg Thank you so much for posting this!

yihaa! :)

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

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

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

Thanks a lot, worked fine.

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.

Wahoooooo! Thank you! :)

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!!!

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

Thanks it worked a treat..

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

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

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

but why does it affect the speech icon specifically?

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

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