Changing a filetypes icon - adding a"shortcut" like mini-icon

R.Wieser wrote:
Ed,

Ah, light dawns.
Well, you can certainly remove the little arrow, and even put it
back again,

Changing the existing shortcut and/or its overlay icon was and/or is not
what I'm after.

But to go further you'd have to tinker with Windows core,
and that would create more problems than benefits.

I've made a few changes to (the supporting files to) the OS myself. Just to
see if I could. Can't remember that it ever went bad.

Any future change, any update, would be in danger of
failing, and, at best, would simply wipe out your change.

:-) You seem to be suggesting to do absolutily nothing so that failure is
impossible and make nothing so it cannot become obsolete either. Are you
? I hope not.

Do some lateral thinking. Backtrack on your problem and look
for other avenues of approach.

While I'm open to other avenues (if you have them do not hesitate to mention
them), I tend to do a thorough search of the direction I've chosen*.
Nothing is as infuriating as throwing your hands up in defeat, only to be
shown that the exit of the dungeon was just another left from where you
started to walk back. :-)

*funnily enough that often turns up possible other avenues that I was not
aware of.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser



You've misinterpreted my advice. I delivered it with no thought or
feeling embracing "do nowt".
Quite the opposite.

I'm suggesting you re-assess your problem.
We humans, as you may well know, use past experience to solve today's
issues. And different people have different pasts. All of which produces
variations on problem-solving.

Now then, you have ended up in a cul-de-sac trying to solve a problem;
and your brain clamours "I need to manipulate Window's shortcut
facilities to advance".
Mine, in a similar situation, might have yelled something different.

So then, what to do?
Step back along the path of your arriving at that cul-de-sac, looking
all the while for some place at which shortcut-icon manipulation wasn't
on the horizon.
The problem will still be visible, but there will be fresh pathways to
right or left available in your search for a solution.

This NG contains some very intelligent and Windows-savvy people who
would be capable of feasibility studies, fact-finding and recommendation
reports; the tools of a systems analyst. Use us.

Ed

"R.Wieser" wrote

| To be honest, I took my cue from the website I posted the link to. I
| tested the "29" entry on XP and saw the change on a shortcut-to-file.
Can
| you tell me what the "30" entry icon is intended for ? Folders perhaps ?
|

I don't know. My shell32.dll shows what looks like a
small black square with a white circle and a lightning
bolt inside for #30. My Windows 98 Registry book by
Johm Woram (still useful!) says 29 is the boxed arrow
shortcut icon and 30 is a large arrow with a white
circle icon. That may be only a Win98 thing but I don't
know. I imagine that any Windows version that allows
you to select between 2 shortcut icons will be using
#30.

I wrote this code years ago and didn't have a note
about why I used both 29 and 30. It might be a Win9x
thing. The icon I see for #30 in XP is something I don't
recognize.

Ed,

You've misinterpreted my advice.

Ah yes : when you don't understand my explanation its my problem and I need
to "delineate" "more explicitly", but when you make a mess of it its my
misinterpretation thats to blame. Sure.

Now then, you have ended up in a cul-de-sac trying to solve a problem; and
your brain clamours "I need to manipulate Window's shortcut facilities to
advance".

Have/do I ? And you know that ... how exactly ? And do you think you
can conclude that cul-de-sac with the subject being just over 24 hours old
when you did ?

Also, do you remember posting the below ?

"I strongly suspect that the little arrow isn't a system variable. If it
were we'd find it tweakable in Ultimate Tweaker or Winaero Tweaker."

In two sentences you show that you know little to nothing about the subject,
and more likely than not have simply overlooked the setting in both(!) those
tweaker programs. 'Cause as posted by Mayayana its actually rather easy to
do. And to add insult to injury, rather easy to google too.

This NG contains some very intelligent and Windows-savvy people who would
be capable of feasibility studies, fact-finding and recommendation
reports; the tools of a systems analyst. Use us.

Yeah, there are. I already spoke with a few. Its just that I don't think
you are one of them.

You "know" too much without bothering to support or (obviously) verify it.
And your "lets drop something before it has run its course and look at
something else instead" also doesn't quite work.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Mayayana,

I don't know. My shell32.dll shows what looks like a
small black square with a white circle and a lightning
bolt inside for #30.

I read that several times before I realized that that is not what I was
trying to ask. :-) My question was aimed at the *registry* string-value
"30" entry.

In shell32.dll the icon under index 30 also looks to be an overlay icon. A
black square the same size (and position!) as the shortcut one with a circle
in it and some vertical-ish line. My first impression was some kind of
power-button - but that doesn't make much sense. Maybe a clock ?

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

"Big Al" wrote

| I changed the icon for the pure educational part of it and I put in a
yellow arrow on a transparent background. It's nice most
| places but on a yellow folder it doesn't show.
|

Now for the rubbish barrel AKA Recycle. #31 is empty
and #32 is full. Mine are red oak wastebaskets. But it
gets complicated. Many icons can be changed under the
Shell Icons key by number. But many of the standard
system "items" like Recycle have GUIDs.

HKCR\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\DefaultIcon\
HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\DefaultIcon

Values are "Empty" and "Full". This is on 98 - XP. I
assume it's still the same in Win7.

Computer: {20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
Documents: {450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}
Printers: {2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
Cntl Panel: {21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

Folders and drives can be changed in the Shell Icons key,
though folder icons have been an issue since XP. Microsoft
like to break things when people start to customize. They
do lots of little things with each release. For example, the
folder view system has been broken since 1998. It's possible
to make it work properly but Explorer itself actually handles
it wrong and MS have never fixed that as far as I know. I
wrote a utility to fix it in XP but then I had to rewrite it
for Vista/7 because MS changed Registry values for no reason
but to break things.

Another good example is the "browse for icon" dialogue.
MS didn't want people using that, and it wasn't documented.
So they'd just change the behavior willy nilly in order to
break peoples' software.

In the old days they actually sold an extra add-on for
creating custom layouts of style and icons. So they didn't
want people to be able to change the icons themselves.
These days their attitude seems to be more that they
just don't want any variation. They want Windows to
be a service that you use and wouldn't think of changing
any more than you'd try to change the layout of your local
ATM screen.

An addendum to that. A third place to change the CLSID
icons, which seems to override the opther two, is like so:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\CLSID\{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}\DefaultIcon

That's the trouble with Windows. Once you go off the main
road you might end up anywhere. It's deliberately booby
trapped.

"R.Wieser" wrote

| I don't know. My shell32.dll shows what looks like a
| small black square with a white circle and a lightning
| bolt inside for #30.
|
| I read that several times before I realized that that is not what I was
| trying to ask. :-) My question was aimed at the *registry* string-value
| "30" entry.
|
Yes. That's what I meant, too. But the order in shell32 is
where they got the numbers. I assumed you knew that.

| In shell32.dll the icon under index 30 also looks to be an overlay icon.
A
| black square the same size (and position!) as the shortcut one with a
circle
| in it and some vertical-ish line. My first impression was some kind of
| power-button - but that doesn't make much sense. Maybe a clock ?
|
Beats me. Or maybe a very, very small high voltage warning.
But it does seem to be some kind of overlay icon. I guess it's
possible that MS just replaced the older, optional arrow with
a filler icon.

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 10:27:23, Mayayana
wrote:
[]
CAVEAT: On XP, at least, such a refresh will cause desktop icons
to line up on the left. There's a warning in the program. Microsoft
like to break things when anyone tries to customize. I use
Icon Restore to save the desktop layout and restore it. I don't
know if there's a Win7 equivalent.
[]
For many (and I do mean many!) years, I used Melissa Nguyen's "EZDesk";
I think I did once get it working on a W7 machine, but never on this
one.
A fairly unintrusive one (that works fine on 7) is iconoid -
https://www.sillysot.com/; another (_slightly_ quirky IMO, like most of
his software) is desktopOK
http://www.softwareok.eu/?seite=Freeware/DesktopOK (which, though it's
not the default, has the old-fashioned option of actually saving
something as an actual file).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Of course, this show - like every other cop show on earth - massively
overstates the prevalence of violent crime: last year, in the whole of the UK,
police fired their weapons just three times. And there were precisely zero
fatalities. - Vincent Graff in RT, 2014/11/8-14

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 15:50:03 +0100, R.Wieser wrote:

In any case, a lot of work for little gain.

Yep, that was what my "Not sure if its worth the trouble" was about (I
already found some stuff talking about it in a rather global way).

On the contrary, I see a lot of potential for such feature. I don't consider
it as a small feature.

Starting with Win7, Windows uses it to mark folders when they are
junctions/symlinks, or have special NTFS permissions.

A custom extension can be made for marking files/folders based on specific
condition(s). e.g.:

- Folder has specific files/subfolders.
- File/folder is being used and is locked.
- Symlink or shortcut file is broken. i.e. points to a non existing object.
- Image file content is vertically oriented.
- Video file content has 4K resolution.
- Archive file is password protected.
- An Excel document was made by specific person name.
- EXE/DLL file is 32-bit/64-bit.

Mayayana,

Yes. That's what I meant, too. But the order in shell32
is where they got the numbers. I assumed you knew that.

Although I noticed that the "29" registry entry had a "29" icon I didn't
directly realise that that was the case.

But you have no idea when that that registry entry and it containing overlay
icon is actually used. The thing is that I can't remember having ever seen
it ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

JJ,

Yep, that was what my "Not sure if its worth the trouble" was
about (I already found some stuff talking about it in a rather
global way).

On the contrary, I see a lot of potential for such feature. I don't
consider it as a small feature.

In my case, its a certainly lot of work just to mark an .ovl file. :-)

Also do notice that there seem to be only 15 "slots" available (presumably
ignoring the 16th-and-above IconOvelayHandler).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

On 31.10.20 20:06, Ed Cryer wrote:
R.Wieser wrote:
Ed,

Ah, light dawns.
Well, you can certainly remove the little arrow, and even put it
back again,

Changing the existing shortcut and/or its overlay icon was and/or is not
what I'm after.

But to go further you'd have to tinker with Windows core,
and that would create more problems than benefits.

I've made a few changes to (the supporting files to) the OS myself. Just to
see if I could. Can't remember that it ever went bad.

Any future change, any update, would be in danger of
failing, and, at best, would simply wipe out your change.

:-) You seem to be suggesting to do absolutily nothing so that failure is
impossible and make nothing so it cannot become obsolete either. Are you
? I hope not.

Do some lateral thinking. Backtrack on your problem and look
for other avenues of approach.

While I'm open to other avenues (if you have them do not hesitate to mention
them), I tend to do a thorough search of the direction I've chosen*.
Nothing is as infuriating as throwing your hands up in defeat, only to be
shown that the exit of the dungeon was just another left from where you
started to walk back. :-)

*funnily enough that often turns up possible other avenues that I was not
aware of.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser



You've misinterpreted my advice. I delivered it with no thought or
feeling embracing "do nowt".
Quite the opposite.

I'm suggesting you re-assess your problem.
We humans, as you may well know, use past experience to solve today's
issues. And different people have different pasts. All of which produces
variations on problem-solving.

Now then, you have ended up in a cul-de-sac trying to solve a problem;
and your brain clamours "I need to manipulate Window's shortcut
facilities to advance".
Mine, in a similar situation, might have yelled something different.

So then, what to do?
Step back along the path of your arriving at that cul-de-sac, looking
all the while for some place at which shortcut-icon manipulation wasn't
on the horizon.
The problem will still be visible, but there will be fresh pathways to
right or left available in your search for a solution.

This NG contains some very intelligent and Windows-savvy people who
would be capable of feasibility studies, fact-finding and recommendation
reports; the tools of a systems analyst. Use us.

Ed

Why not edit the icon repository?
It contains the small uparrow icon.

"R.Wieser" wrote

| But you have no idea when that that registry entry and it containing
overlay
| icon is actually used. The thing is that I can't remember having ever
seen
| it ...
|

Nor I. But the idea of having a choice of two different
arrows in '98 sounds familiar. So that could be it. But
otherwise I don't know. I only know that as of 1998 #30
referred to a shortcut icon. I looked around yesterday for
a full list of shell icons but didn't find it. Yet I've written
software to do this. That's when I thought to look in the
Win '98 Registry book. They don't write 'em like that
anymore.

"R.Wieser" wrote

| Also do notice that there seem to be only 15 "slots" available (presumably
| ignoring the 16th-and-above IconOvelayHandler).
|

And MS reserves 4 of them. And apparently
many are used up by the likes of Dropbox. So
maybe using informative file names instead isn't
such a bad idea.

Mayayana,

I only know that as of 1998 #30 referred to a shortcut icon.

And it still does. But it intrigues me that I cant remember having ever
seen it. Regardless of in Win98 or XP.

I looked around yesterday for a full list of shell icons but
didn't find it.

I did the same thing (googeling in my case). Alas, with the same result.

Thanks for the looking.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser