Microsoft Office 2007 icons turn white on desktop, start menu, taskbar

We use a third party inventory and patch management system to roll out Microsoft updates silently. Unfortunately every once in a while a patch or patches will cause the icons for the updated applications to turn white on certain machines which wasn't noted during the test cycle. We've just seen that happen in our Windows 7 environment while rolling out the April Patch Tuesday patches, where Word and Outlook icons were borked on certain machines. I haven't confirmed this yet, but there were only a few packages pushed so it looks like KB 2863811 (Outlook) and KB 2878237 (Word) were involved. We did not see this on machines patched by WSUS or Microsoft Update.

There are a lot of articles out there about fixing icons by deleting iconcache.db but that's of little help if the base icon is borked. The trick of repairing Microsoft Office Picture Manager within the application didn't help either.

I isolated the issue to two shortcut sets:
C:\Users\Public\Desktop and
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office

I got "known good" Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.lnk and Microsoft Office Word 2007.lnk files from another machine and made a copy on a network share under a folder called deskicon. I then wrote the following quick script. It had to be run as an administrative user on the machine since both of the folders above are not writable by users.

cd \users\public\desktop
xcopy \\fileshare.domain.local\fixes\deskicon\*.* . /Y
cd C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
xcopy \\fileshare.domain.local\fixes\deskicon\*.* . /Y

The Start Menu pinned icons, Start Menu All Programs, and All Users Desktop icons were fixed by this. On restarting the applications, the taskbar icon displayed correctly. This fix will be rolled out to the userbase via GPO with some refinements. Hope that helps somebody out there!

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