Two blue arrows at top right of icons

I archived the folder and the text went blue as expected...

Blue text in Explorer = NTFS compression is enabled via the properties (this has been standard in Windows for many versions now).

Two blue arrows is Windows 10's new way of showing the same thing, at the icon-level.

Reference/More info:

• Compress or Uncompress Files and Folders in Windows 10
• Properties dialog image source

edit:

When I just recently installed Office 2007, I noticed the same arrows on the icons for the programs.

That's kind of weird, and is may be just a matter of icon cache corruption.

For that, here's a couple things to try:

Ensure the EXEs are not actually compressed.

Try creating new shortcuts to the EXEs and see if they appear as expected.

Try clearing Windows' icon cache and see if that corrects the icons. For that, see this existing SU question: Refresh Icon Cache Without Rebooting

The files under Desktop folder have same issue. I solved problem using below steps.

• Right click to Desktop folder.
• Click to Advanced button
• Unchecked compress contents to save disk spaces. Click Ok, ok and apply buttons.

After these steps, arrows should be disappeared and also you can use below command to clear icon cache.

ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache

This does indicate compressed files and in my experience had some broken behavior with shortcuts, so I "fixed" it a few weeks ago. You can hide this overlay in the same way as people have been hiding the shortcut arrow overlay for years, it's just a different number key in the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons]
"179"="empty.ico,0"

Put a blank icon file in Windows/System32 and perform the registry change above (easiest way is to copy the above and paste in to notepad, save as a new file with the .reg extension, then double click that file).

If you're doing it manually that's a String/REG_SZ value, and you can of course put a full file path there if you don't want to put things in System32.

You can read about how I found this out, download an empty icon, enable/disable .reg files and a batch file to both copy the icon and run the registry change on my blog: http://nerdshack.info/windows-10-and-double-arrow-icon-of-death/

Hope that helps :)

The real problem seems to be a bug: the (Office) shortcuts refer to icons that are in %systemroot%\installer... and these folders are now compressed so also the icon is compressed. Workaround: create new shortcuts that refer to the (uncompressed) executables. (or uncompress the installer folders: not recommended).