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Give Internet Explorer a smaller desktop icon

Update 9/2/99: I found a Registry entry a few days ago that lets you change the size of all your desktop icons:
In RegEdit, go to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\Shell Icon Size

My default was set to "32" (pixels).
Simply change this value to the size of desktop icons you desire.

This page contains tweaks specific to Web Browsers (Internet Explorer 4, 5 and Netscape Navigator) as well as email clients (namely Outlook Express).

This tweak will get rid of ie40's ugly and (market-department-specified) large icon (and replace it with one that is much more tidy.
You can use your own icon if you wish.

*Note: You will need an icon-editing utility.  Any old icon utility will do.  You can get one anywhere, try winfiles.com or download.com

1. Download my ie40 icon (right-click and select "save-as") (or you can make your own or find one you like on the web).

2. Backup the files we'll be working with..  In this case the only file we will be dealing with will be for w95 users: iexplore.exe (w95: c:\Program Files\iexplore.exe) or NT users: shdocvw.dll (NT: c:\winnt\system32\shdocvw.dll).
(as a fail-safe, we'll edit the back-up versions of the files and swap them later)

3. With your Icon editor, open the back-up version of iexplore.exe (or shdocvw.dll in NT).  Replace the default Icon with the new one, at each resolution and color depth.  (if you are using more than 16-colors, simply replace the 256-color versions and ignore the 16-color icons).
Save the iexplore file you were editing and close the icon-editor.

4. This is the only tricky part.  Make sure ie isn't running, and rename the original (something like iexplore.bak or iexplore2.exe or anything) and then rename your backup file so it has the original name.  Got it?

5. If this change doesn't take place right away (you can press F5 to refresh any window), reboot into safe-mode,  delete the shelliconcache file.  (w95: c:\windows\shelliconcache) and reboot again.   At which time the shelliconcache will be rebuilt.

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