After applying a change to an icon, I must reboot each time before the change is visually applied. Is this normal behavior?

Sometimes the Windows Explorer takes a random amount of time to refresh the parent folder of an imbued folder. There are even times when the change is not visible after a lot of time or several reboots.

That's a Windows issue, not an icomancer issue. It has to do with the icon cache.

In order to "force" Windows Explorer to refresh the parent folder, icomancer creates a temporary file in the target folder and keeps it for a couple of seconds before deleting it. That trick works on most computers, but not with all of them.

Now, in order to manually do something similar, you can, after imbuing an icon to a folder -either by direct imbue or by crafting and applying-:

• Double-click the folder
  
• Create a temporary folder or file of any type (text, word, whatever)
  
• Hit F5 to refresh
  
• Delete the temporary folder or file you've just created
  
• Hit F5 again
  
• Go back to the parent folder

That should then refresh the icon :)

Now, there's a way to force the Windows Explorer to purge the system icon cache and force it to rebuild all icons of all folders and files in all your hard drives. If you want to check it out, please follow the next guide:
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/how-to-rebuild-the-icon-cache-in-windows-vista/

On Windows XP is a bit more complicated, but also possible:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1202726,00.asp

Tags:
refresh time, icon refresh, icon, cache