How-To Geek

I think this happens after restarting, but I'm not sure what program prompted me to restart. My Wells Fargo Bank icon is a Playboy Rabbit Head, the Amazon.com is generic, and the Playboy Cyber Club is the same as the Google icon, a big weird G. I just got the Geek Head yesterday, and today it is generic also.

Hi Scott: Sorry about forcing you to check out my favorite website. I recently had a problem with HP, and let their technician take control of my computer. When we finished, the problem was solved, but the next morning I noticed that several of my desktop icons (.url shortcuts) had changed- some were now generic, and others had been swapped with each other: Amazon.com icon was generic, Playboy CyberClub was a Google weird G, etc. Yesterday I changed my default browser to Google, and reset my desktop appearance to Windows Vista Basic, and my screen resolution to 1600x1000, and I got the correct, original (real) Amazon.com icon back, and my Wells Fargo Bank changed from the Playboy Rabbit Head back to the correct one. All that's good, but I don't know what I did to change things, and I still have the Google G for my CygerClub icon. I usually Google a website, then create a desktop icon for it. Does any of this make sense to you? Thanks.

Charlie, I know exactly what you are talking about. I just wanted to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. Also, I was curious to know which browser you use. With Internet Explorer, you can right-click in a page and select "Create shortcut" and it will create an Internet Shortcut file on your desktop and use the the favicon from the website for the icon. I have seen this work on my desktop and I have seen the icons get messed up just as you describe. I think the problem is that the favicons from the websites live in some temporary place where they can be deleted or renamed.

If you have some URLs on your desktop that you plan to use often, and are willing to go through a little extra trouble, you can make the icons more permanent. First, you need to make a folder to hold your website icons. Then navigate to the page, make your desktop shortcut, then find the favicon in the browser's cache. In IE7, select Tools -> Internet Options -> Browsing History Settings button -> View Files button. Set the view to small/medium/large icons so you can see the one you are looking for. It may be that they are always called "favicon.ico" with sequence numbers in square brackets []. Make a copy of the icon you are after in the folder you designated to hold your website icons. Rename the .ico file to something descriptive. Now, find the desktop shortcut, right-click and select Properties and on the Web Document tab, click the Change Icon button, then click the Browse button. Navigate to your website icons folder, find the one you want and choose it. Done.

This procedure will keep those icons in a permanent place instead of some cache folder somewhere. Once the icons are set this way, they should not get jumbled or reset to default. If they do, it will be easy to set them back.

This is interesting. I knew that the theme change would restore the standard icons like Recycle bin (had to do that a couple of times myself), - but it is good to know that it will also take care of custom icons.