Parallels changing appearance of Mac dock icons

Hi.

I have been a Parallels Desktop for Mac user since version 6 or something, back in 2011. But recently I changed my setup to free-up space on my Mac hard drive. I had been running Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition, (but under Parallels), and now I have removed that partition and installed Win 7 under Parallels in a more conventional manner on the main partition, which has freed-up nearly 100GB of storage space.)

Importing the Bootcamp VM wasn't an option for me because I had so little free space remaining, and so I had to reinstall Win 7 from scratch, as it were.

I still wanted the user interface with Parallels to remain the same, and that meant having it up so that, in Coherence mode, when I launch a Windows app it's icon appears in my Mac dock with a dot underneath it, just like a Mac app would. This also means I can close individual Windows apps by Cmd+Q, without accidentally quitting the whole VM.

I have managed to get Parallels to behave in this way, (mainly through a trial & error process...), but something is wrong somewhere.

I have one Windows icon permanently in my Mac dock, and so I can click it to launch it straight from my dock. But once the app is launched it's icon in the dock changes from what it should look like into an icon that looks like a piece of paper with a pencil, a paintbrush and a ruler forming a letter 'A' on it.

And it is even worse than that... Now, when I double-click on a file on my Mac desktop to open it, the Mac app icon that appears in my dock is exactly that same strange paper & pencil one. So if I double-click on a .jpg file on my Mac desktop to open Preview, for example, the file is opened by Preview, but the icon that appears in the dock is that same strange paper one again. And if I launch a couple of different apps at once I get two identical icons like that one beside the other, which is confusing.

Here is a small screen-shot of what these rogue icons look like:-


The apps represented by those two identical icons side-by-side happen to be Word for Mac 2016 and Preview, both running entirely in the Mac environment, and yet Parallels has changed the icons for some reason.

I know that it is Parallels doing this because it only started happening after I changed Parallels settings today from 'isolate from Mac' to a degree of integration, (to allow launching apps from the dock), but without full file, desktop and folder sharing.

Can anyone offer an explanation why these icons are being changed? And can anyone offer a solution to the problem please?

 

Billymac231, that is really strange but Parallels did do that. It seems the macOS launch services database has been corrupted (not by Parallels You can rebuilt this database using the article below. After that just reboot macOS. Let me know the results.

https://eclecticlight.co/2017/08/11/launch-services-database-problems-correcting-and-rebuilding/

 

Thanks for that. I haven't digested that article in full, but certainly the example it gives of the text document opening the wrong app isn't what was happening with me...

The correct apps were being launched, complete with the correct menu bar title and everything, it was just the dock icons that were wrong. Even hovering the cursor over those wrong icons evoked the 'speech bubble' thing over them, which correctly proclaimed those in my screen shot to be Word and Preview.

You may notice I'm using the past tense here. This morning the first thing that i did was shut down my Win 7 VM, and then shut down my Mac. I restarted my Mac, which for some reason was then extremely slow, and then I restarted the Win 7 VM. And after that, (I'm reluctant to say this and tempt fate...), the problem seems to have gone away. I was going to reinstall Parallels Tools if it was still there after the restarts, but I haven't needed to do that. I will be back if it begins mis-behaving again.

ps. Incidentally, do you recognise what those icons were? Were they Parallels/Windows ones?

 

It is "generic" icon for all .app in the macOS system if there no icon inside .app bundle or associations were broken.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5386679?start=0&tstart=0

p.s. ...

• providing ancillary information about files and URLs, such as an associated icon,