Hi Rudd--
If you're trying to get any favicon, some websites as you say have them and
some don't, and some have them but they won't drag even if you try the trick
of snapping them like suspenders 3 times (some will).
Vista differs from XP in one important respect concerning icon exchange.
You cannot exchange icons for shortcuts but can for folders in Vista (why
they did that I have no earthly idea). In XP you can.
I don't understand your comment about notepad at all. You wrote:
"However, tab "General" of the shortcut displays the correct icon en
looking inside using notepad, I see "IconFile=" pointed to the correct
URL"
I don't understand where you're looking or how you're relating notepad to
exchanging for a favicon that you want to preserve as an icon or any other
icon. Again you cannot exchange a shortcut icon in Vista; but you have to
do the exchange with a folder icon.
Here's how I collect icons including favicons and the couple thousand
intrinsic icons in Vista or XP and the programs you install or download to
install:
collect icons including favicons from
www.whatever.com/favicon.ico when
they are available (I mean by that I add favicon.ico to the url and see if I
can drag a favicon from the resulting window if one is available). Then I
put the icons in a folder and can exchange them from properties>customize
tab>change icon button or similar buttons when you right click properties.
You cannot exchange with shortcuts in Vista for some very stupid reason, but
you can exchange with folders.
The way to keep the "e" from coming back when you reboot or clear Temp
Internet Files is that you have to apply two rules.
1) You have to rename the new icon or favicon
2) You have to give it a house, i.e. you have to tuck it into a folder.
If you don't fulfill both those requirements you're going to loose that new
icon you exchanged.
There are 3 major avenues toward getting icons: he ways are 1) favicons 2)
Native icons within Windows OS's--there are 100's you can mine 3) The icon
extractors--many of them.
To get the You Tube favicon (I tried to post an image but the group wouldn't
allow a small 32 KB image) you simply type
www.youtube.com/favicon.ico and
then left click mouse drag the favicon from the window onto the deskktop.
It's a simple concept; once you drag a favicon out of a window, you have to
give it a name and a
house. You have to save the icons in a folder--I call mine originally
"Favicons."
1) Many sites have a "logo-like" icon available (but not all) if you add
favicon.ico to the url after a forward slash.
2) #1 can change over time--not all have them.
3) Some sites won't yield the favicon--i.e. you'll see it and it refuses to
drag complete with a no drag sign--a slash surrounded by a circle when you
try.
All Windows OS's including Vista have between 1000 and 2000 "instrinsic" or
"native" icons. Many of them come from some of the .dll folders in the
Vista Drive\Windows\System 32 folder; they can come from downloaded
programs, installed programs, zip files, etc. When you right click a folder
in Vista>properties>browse>you can browse to a particular Program--for
example if Microsoft Office is in your C:\Programs files you can harvest
different Office icons from the different programs like Access, Word,
Powerpoint, Excel, Infopath, One Note, etc. Sometimes other folders will
have icons for use--you have to check them out on a trial/error basis.
Note that all your download programs often have many folders for icons for
example C:\Programs\Photoshop or C:\Windows or C:\ZipFiles\Whatever Program.
Even hidden file folders can yield interesting icons. You're going to kiss
some frogs for example on the System 32 .dlls, but native to Vista or
Windows XP and other Windows OS flavors you'll find staches of interesting
icons like moricons.dll, hticons.dll, pifmgr.dll
Icons are stashed in many of the of the C:\Windows\System 32 .dllsand they
can be exchanged. There is one important and unfortunate difference in
Vista and XP; in XP you can exchange icons for shortcuts; in
Vista you can only exchange for explorer folders, i.e. rt.
clickdesktop>new>folder then rt. click folder>properties>customize or
sometimes modify>change icon.
Good luck,
CH
