Summary

Possible reasons why the installer icon is using an older icon or the default icon after changing the icon path to a new icon.

Synopsis

The setting to change the installer icon can be found in the Advanced Designer by going to Installer UI > Look & Feel Settings > Installer Icon > Executable Icon Path. Sometimes, updating this setting to a new custom icon path can fail to update the installer icon. This article goes over some possible scenarios where this may fail.

Discussion

• Building an installer on a non-Windows machine or for a non-Windows target machine. Currently, the Installer Icon feature is only compatible on Windows. This feature utilizes libraries and executables available only on Windows, so it is required that the install.exe is built on a Windows machine.
• Building more than one project at a time. InstallAnywhere incorporates a custom installer icon at build time by changing the icon of self-extractor .exe files under <IA_HOME>\resource\launchanywheres\windows>. Therefore, if you specify a custom icon file, it is recommended that you build one project at a time. If you launch two instances of the same InstallAnywhere installation and build two different projects at the same time, each of which has a different icon selected on the Installer Icon setting, the wrong icon for one or both projects may be used.
• Windows icon cache has not been rebuilt. To rebuild the icon cache, follow the steps below:
  1. Find the IconCache.db file, it is a hidden file under %localappdata%, e.g. C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local
  2. Delete or rename the IconCache.db file
  3. Either reboot your machine or kill the explore.exe process and then restart it
  4. Rebuild your installer.
• Using a command-line build. See Old Icon Used When Building an InstallAnyhwere Installer from the Command-line
• Unable to access the Windows self-extractor location. Antivirus software or permissions issues can restrict access to the self-extractor location: <IA_HOME>\resource\launchanywheres\windows>. This can cause the installer icon to not display correctly.