Windows XP Home Loses Icons

I use XP Home SP3 on a machine that's less than a year old. Two times now, Windows has lost icons for WordPerfect, Hallmark Card Studio 2010, Word, Excel, Google Earth, and iTunes. In each case, all disappeared at the same time and were replaced with the generic blue-above-white boxes. Searching for the icons that the desktop shortcuts look for yields nothing–the icons actually appear to be gone. Reinstalling or repairing the installations restores the icons, but this just can't be good. What's happening, and how do I make it stop? On what may be a related topic, I prefer my windows and buttons to be in Windows Classic style, but about 75% of the time, the machine reverts to Windows XP style on bootup. I use the XP firewall and the free version of avast! antivirus. Avast reports no infections. I also occasionally scan with Malwarebytes, and it also reports no infections.

Unfortunately, you told us nothing of your system. This could be a graphics issues. Any errors in Device Manager? Since this is less than 1 year old, it should still be under warranty. I would urge you to get on record with the maker that you are possibly having hardware issues.

The machine is a homebrew from CompUsa parts, so warranty service is probably out. Where do I find a list of errors in Device Manager?

The individual parts should be warrantied too.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310123

Some possibilities here: Rebuild icon cache to fix incorrectly displayed icons