Shortcut Arrow - Change, Remove, or Restore

luc67ien said:

Thanks for your prompt response, Shawn.

I can get back to the ugly shortcut arrow w/ no trouble. The programs work in that regard as does simply removing the "29" entry via in the reg editor.

It was just no matter what I tried, I got the ugly black box you see in the screenshoot. I also thought it suspicious that when I unblocked the Blank.ico, it when from transparent on my desktop to the same ugly black box. That was why I tried creating my own empty icon.

I thought about maybe replacing the shortcut icon in the shell32.dll file, but then you run into all kinds of hassles because it's a system file that Window has perpetually locked.

However, while perusing shell32.dll I noticed there are a couple of blank entries in it already. So, being the adventurous type, I tweaked the registry entry so the value looks like this:

C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll,50

Viola! no more ugly shortcut icons. That's basically what the manual process here says, but I could not get it to work w/ an external .ico file.

I'm sure that by now you've discovered that this works and looks nice only until you reboot. Sooner or later all your icons get invisible.

I ran into a bug with the 64 bit FxVisor as well, getting an Unhandled Exception like Alan's when I was about to log off. Difference is the top right of my screen started flickering right after. When I restarted my display was off center and text was blocky, and I was unable to change my resolution due to "Out of Range" errors from my monitor. Again booting up Vista Shortcut Overlay manager and trying to switch it back (while yielding the same Unhandled Exception) did little to nothing, though another restart and a manual image adjustment via my monitor's controls has seemed to get things more or less back to normal. But it feels like more of a bandaid than a fix, any idea what FxVisor processes might've had this effect, and how to track what changes might've done this? I can't find if fxvisor created a log or an automatic registry backup or anything...

Oh, thanks for the prompt reply. Just installed a week ago, UAC is still on, SP1 and fully updated as well. .NET framework is as turned on as it is by default, as in I haven't touched it. It's "on," though WCF HTTP activation as well as Non-HTTP activation are both turned off. I'm not as concerned with getting it working (as Ultimate Windows Tweaker has the same function) as much as I am concerned about what it would've altered in my system to make my display properties behave like that.

i see a screenshot just like of my desktop....can someone help me. rebuilding iconcache.db doesnt work.

I don't know if this is obnoxious or rude, and I apologize if it is either!
But, when I wanted to get rid of the arrows, at least for the non system applications, and even then, for some of them at least, I found the actual .exe in the program files folder/ Windows folder respectively. Copy, paste onto the desktop, and there I had it.

It wasn't a shortcut anymore, but still pointed to the same program, and read the same files to do so. I can't get it for a Computer icon, but that was it. A lot more simple than a utility or reg editing in my opinion.

I hope this helps, or at least invokes some thought. And I really hope this wasn't brought up previously...