Industrialcraft isn't actually loaded into the game, I found this in the forge log:
Code
[17:34:49] [Client thread/INFO] [FML/]: FML has found a non-mod file industrialcraft-2-2.2.827-experimental-api.jar in your mods directory. It will now be injected into your classpath. This could severe stability issues, it should be removed if possible.
possibly this is related to a missing mcmod.info file, but its happening in older versions of forge as well.
If relevant, I recently pulled Gregtech out of the mods folder.