Win 7 Icons - Separate icons for all media files - How to?

hi all

ok so i know that changing icons has been asked before but what I want to know is a little different and could not find it in the forums.

Looking for something which can be done easily in XP but I am stumped in Win7. I want to have different file icons for all the media files. Currently, if I use any 3rd party tool like filesman to change the icons for say an avi file, it sets the new icon for all media files! What it seems to be doing is changing the icon for all media files that are associated with the MPC (player that i use to view all media files).

What I want is that I can set the file icon for .avi, .wmv, .mpg, etc to separate file icons and still have them associated with MPC as default player.

Here are the files I will be using to fetch the icons from and the filetypes that I will set:

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE -->JPEG,JPE,JPG,GIF icon
C:\WINDOWS\system32\quartz.dll --> for MPG, AVI, MOV icons
dxmasf.dll --> for ASF, WMV icons

Ofcourse, those are paths on my local machine and they could differ.

Please help me with this. On XP, it was a piece of cake but I am at my wit's end on win7 and facing a lot of problems identifying the video files from each other right now.

Thanks,
Slayer

Thanks for your replies... but that is not what I am looking for. Any other suggestions particularly on how I can actually fix these media icons? Registry hack is also welcome if there is no simple solution.

lehnerus2000 said:

slayer213 said:

Please help me with this. On XP, it was a piece of cake but I am at my wit's end on win7 and facing a lot of problems identifying the video files from each other right now.

You could use the "Sort by" and Group by" options in Windows Explorer.

I can't ever remember doing that in XP, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that was "a piece of cake" (like creating your own context menu entries).

You might have to hack the Registry.

In XP- you just go to Folder Options -> File Types and associate your file type with whatever icon you wanted. Nothing could be simpler than that!

M$ - epic fail with this on Win 7 - why, oh why, did you take such a useful feature away?

I guess where im coming from is win98. It used to have all these separate icons for avi n mpeg files. When I upgraded to xp, I could still manage to do it by the files type tab.
Weird thing is I am currently using win 7 sp1 & can't seem to do this but initially had win 7 and I somehow managed to set these icons. Sad part is I just dont remember how

So no bright ideas from any of the experts here?

lehnerus2000 said:

Have you read through the comments in this article?
Change a File Type’s Icon in Windows 7

FileTypesMan seems to work for some people and fail for others.

Have you tried this suggestion?

For those who can’t get it to work null out the perceived type field as this will take precedence over the icon you selected.

I also found this article about editing the Registry.
How to Change a File Type Icon in Windows 7 and Vista - The Winhelponline Blog

Filestypesman doesnt work for me. It changes the file icons for all the media files that are associated with mpc. I have also looked at the additional suggestion that you have mentioned and it did not help either.

All that is left now is to try the registry hack. I will try this & update if I am successful or not.