Corrupted icons in Finder and Mail

My icons for files and folders often get corrupted as shown here:
http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/spag/dm/corrupted_icons.pdf
The problem is cured (temporarily) by a reboot, but not by relaunching the Finder. Strangely, the problem "spreads" like an infection: at first, only the icons in one folder viewed in the Finder are corrupted, then quickly more and more get corrupted. The bad icons even infiltrate some applications, like Mail - see the bottom two icons in the rightmost screen shot of the link. When a single file has a bad icon, I can "delete" that icon in the info window for that file, and it reverts to normal. This does not seem to work when the corrupted icon is that of a folder.
I have a suspicion that the problem tends to spread from "old" files (never folders) that pre-date OSX. But that's not much more than speculation, since many of my files are of that type. Also, the problem has spread to other macs that I "migrated" to from the one originally affected.
Any help at all - such as suggestions of how to cleanse my Mac so that this does not reoccur - would be greatly appreciated...
Sandy

The problem is still not understood, but it seems I've been able to get rid of it. Many years ago (quite possibly still under OS9) I had given some folders special icons to make them stand out visually. I then put those folders in the toolbar of the Finder window (even now under Leopard, where dragging folders to the toolbar no longer seems to be officially encouraged but still works). In search of "anything unusual" to do with icons I now removed those pictures from the folders in their info field (so now they look normal again, like any other folders), and haven't had any more corrupted icons since. This has now been stable for about a fortnight, while before this measure I had newly corrupted icons about twice a week at least.
Caveat: I didn't remove those custom-made icons from all my folders: I simply forgot two of them (which, however, were changed later I think). So even if restoring generic icons to some folders solved the problem, the problem will most certainly be difficult to reproduce.

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