Odd issue with folder icons in explorer?

Hey there

I got bored with the way my Asus M70VM was looking so I decided to tart it up a bit and make it look like an Alienware...

So I dl'd AlienGUise and installed it. The version I installed in Vista is fine, if a little rubbish looking but it's different so I'm sticking with.

Problem I have is in XP.

I've installed the Xenomorph theme, it's basically an Alienware branded version of a Vista looking XP theme.

Oddly the Vista AlienGUise theme (called Invader) looks more like it's running in XP and now my XP OS looks like Vista because it's running Xenomorph.

Anyway I digress. I had some shortcuts to folders on my desktop and I didn't like the icon the theme was using so I swapped the icons for the icons used in the Vista theme (Invader) by simply copying them over the XP ones.

But I still have the old rubbish looking folder icon from the Xenomorph theme being used when I navigate through my HDD using explorer.

I've looked through the files used by the AlienGUise theme (and done a search for all .ico files on my HDD) and there is no sign of the original Alienware Xenomorph theme icon that is still appearing as the folder icon so I'm slightly confused here.

Does anyone know how I can change the folder icon used?

The pic below shows the icon it's using (in the window), the ones on the desktop are the ones I would like it to use.

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

P.S. Chaz please don't move this to the Alienware forum as this isn't specifically about Alienware, it just happens I'm using an Alienware theme. Thanks.

Pic -

 

ok this will sound stupid: have you tried restarting the pc?

 

XP has an icon cache, first rebuild it and see if that help fix the icon issue.

If I’m not mistaken, folder icon and most other standard system icons are taken from a file called shell32.dll. Some extreme customization programs either modify or replace this file, therefore you may have to find the original file (from XP installation CD) and replace it.

 

@mathx - Yep a few times.

@phoenixfx - yeah I know about shell32.dll, I don't want the old XP icons back I just want to change the ones the AlienGUise Xenomorph theme uses in certain places, I've had a look through shell32.dll by selecting it when changing an icon and it all appears unmodified.

I'll try rebuilding the iconcache and see if that does anything.

It's also doing the same thing with the start menu where it shows the programs list as well.

It's using icons that don't physically exist as .ico files because I've replaced all instances with the ones I want the theme to be using.

I've got wbload.exe sitting in my list of processes, could it be that the version of windowblinds that AlienGUise uses is overriding the loose .ico files and pulling them from a .dll file (one that isn't shell32.dll in the windows tree) or some other filetype somewhere?

 

Then rebuild the icon cache, a corrupted icon cache can cause this kind of problems. Use TweakUI.

 

@phoenixfx - you sir are a genius. I deleted the iconcache.db file and restarted, all is good now.

I really must remember to rebuild the iconcache when I make changes to icons, I had to do that a few months ago when I had problems with having the shortcut arrow on the icons...

Thanks guys, much appreciated.