faint white squares around desktop icons

[Guest]

Because I often work at a greater distance from my monitor than do most
people, I use large icons on my Vista Business desktop. Since I went to the
large icons, there is a faint white square around each non-Windows icon. Only
the Documents, My Computer, and Trash icons do not have the squares. Each
side of the square measures about 1.5-inch (about 38mm). The squares are
transparent except for the faint white border, which indicates they may be
some kind of overlay. I want to get rid of them. How?

 

[Lucvdv]

Because I often work at a greater distance from my monitor than do most
people, I use large icons on my Vista Business desktop. Since I went to the
large icons, there is a faint white square around each non-Windows icon. Only
the Documents, My Computer, and Trash icons do not have the squares. Each
side of the square measures about 1.5-inch (about 38mm). The squares are
transparent except for the faint white border, which indicates they may be
some kind of overlay. I want to get rid of them. How?

Yes, I notice it here too. It looks like all icons have it that have
a shortcut overlay icon superimposed over them (that shortcut arrow in
the lower left corner is actually a separate icon, all transparent
except for the arrow, and it is displayed as a new layer on top of
another icon).

So it looks like that shortcut overlay is the culprit. Icons usually
contain several different images in different sizes and color depths
in a single icon file, and in this case the large size image will
probably have a thin non-transparent border around it, that the
smaller versions don't.

This means it won't be easy to fix, because that overlay isn't stored
as a separate icon file, but as a resource in shell32.dll.


There's one exception: web shortcuts don't have a border.
That probably means they're using a different overlay icon (stored
somewhere else, in an IE dll or so).

 

[Guest]

Shawn, thanks very much for this helpful info. I think I will try option 2.
Before I do though, I need to make sure this will work in a 32bit environment
because I noticed that your tutorials appear to be set up for Vista 64bit.

 

[Guest]

Hi Lucvdv, thanks for the reply. Actually, I had already removed the arrows
using a program suggested by someone in this forum. Perhaps the frames are
left over from that operation, I don't know. Anyway, I am going to try to
reduce the size of my icons a little at a time until those frames go away
using suggestions from another reply. Hopefully the icons will still be large
enough for me to see. Mike

 

[Guest]

What I did was use both methods. First I selected Medium icons from the View
Menu, then I did the ctrl/rightmouse/scroll wheel thing on the Trash bin and
increased the size until the icon had a white frame. The I repeated the
second method but this time rolled back one click on the wheel, and that did
it. It also took care of the other icons, so you only have to do it to one
icon. Thanks again. Mike