How did Microsoft replace all the drive, folder, printer, etc icons?
This is actually quite “cool” how they did this. Explorer has Registry entries for each icon type it displays, and grabs that icon type from an .ICO or .DLL file when it starts. It usually grabs them from SHELL32.DLL. Plus Themes also support these Shell icons, though they don’t document them. Look for a library file labeled COOL.DLL (I’m not making this up!) and QuickView it, or try changing the icon for any shortcut and use COOL.DLL as the source for the new icon. There are icons in that library to replace all the normal Shell icons. Theme support also includes replacing the SHELL32 icons with these COOL ones. You won’t notice any changes to the icons until you use 65 thousand or 16 million colour modes; then the system over-writes COOL.DLL with a HiColor version. The HiColor icons really stand out compared to the 256 colour ones. NOTE: If you ever have to re-install Win95, Setup will restore the original SHELL32 icons; you’ll need to re-install Plus to restore the COOL icons. Angelo
