Windows error 1414 (ERROR_INVALID_ICON

Status / error code:		Category:

Constant name:
Source:		Operating System:
Description: the icon handle supplied to USER32 is invalid or no longer identifies an icon.

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ERROR_INVALID_INDEX	ERROR_PRIVATE_DIALOG_INDEX

ERROR_INVALID_ICON_HANDLE

The HICON is not a valid icon handle

Icons are opaque GUI resources used by windows, classes, dialogs, and shell-facing presentation. An HICON must come from an icon-loading or icon-creation path and remain valid for the lifetime required by the API that stores or uses it.

Handle-type confusion is especially easy because cursors and icons share related underlying image concepts and both are opaque handle-sized values. Ownership also differs between shared loaded images and application-created icons, so generic cleanup code can destroy a handle it does not own.

What to check

Trace the icon loader/creator and whether shared-resource semantics were requested.
Check for premature DestroyIcon during class or window lifetime.
Keep icon and cursor fields strongly separated in wrappers and diagnostics.
When updating a class icon, preserve the old/new handle lifetime until the class and windows no longer reference it.

A missing icon resource during load is different; here an API has been given a value that is not a valid icon handle.

References

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