Generic application icon problem

The Problem:
I have several applications that have becom "broken" and have started to use what I would call, "the generic OS X application icon," rather than the proper icon for that app. Searched the apple website like crazy, but could not find anything about this basic problem. Not even sure where to post it!
I think this may be a preferences problem, maybe? Can anyone steer me to the proper information?
Thanks,
John

My guess would be that is a preference file. Run Preferential Treatment and test your user level preferences for corruption. If that doesn't give you any results that I would try deleting the following preference files:
/Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
/Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
and the pref file for the application in question
If you are feeling really daring what I personally would do is erase all preference files (including the ones mentioned above) except those which you need, i.e the Explorer folder, the one to your current mail client, Photoshop if you have it, IM application...anything with settings you can't or would be hard/time consuming to replace. Just drag all the prefs to a folder on the desktop and restart, if it works than hold on the pref files in the folder till you know that you don't need to replace any of them.

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Generic application icon problem

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