I did NOT have a maximum size problem
My icon cache had reached 6,425,526 bytes, and was absolutely stagnant.
Nothing got added, nothing got cancelled.
Some desktop icons were NOT cached and on start-up they had Windows Default icons for a long time until explorer visited the shortcut destinations.
Regseeker 1.55 fixed everything.
Six Mbytes was reduced to 1,106,590 bytes, and on startup EVERY shortcut was immediately given its assigned icon from the new rebuilt cache,
but all the positions had changed and when I clicked on the top left corner the icon was not where I wanted it.
I had used RegShot to monitor Regseekser and that produced a 1 Mbyte file listing changes to values in a few MUI cache registry keys.
I knew that my icon cache was a file, now rebuilt, and that the only other changes were in the registry,
but I did not know which changes rebuilt the icon cache, and which were the screen coordinates that had suffered damage,
so I restored the Erunt registry backup and that got my icons where they belonged,
but after the reboot the icon cache doubled in size for an unknown reason - but it still did all I wanted of it.
That cache remains fixed at 2 MB.
It presumably still holds all icons for applications now removed.
Recent New Applications have Windows Defaults until explorer or whatever it is happens to find and present the icon.
When I get tired of the icon delay I may give Kelly and Tweaki a whirl.
Computers do things faster than humans, and they find more devious ways of going wrong more quickly.
Ideally an Icon Cache should NOT need manual intervention unless something is wrong.
If you need to delete the Icon cache so it can be automatically rebuilt,
you really should be aware that you are depending upon the auto-repair capability of a broken mechanism.
All bets are off and you can come unstuck and the Internet will give many solutions.
All I could do was try each in turn with the fall-back position that I had a partition image backup,
and if all else failed I could restore that image so that I undid the Winapp2.ini damage,
and I would again have half my icons appear on startup and the other half would arrive when Windows got around to it.
If the icon cache is bad then some icons fail to appear instantly but the eventually arrive.
How do we improve the computing experience of the average naive user with a perfectly adequate cache,
if he cleans to the best that he knows how and we wipe out his cache every day,
and every day he suffers delay whilst the cache is rebuilt ?