Have you been trying to change your system icons but haven't been able to find where they are to change?

With most icons in Win XP you can just right click the file/shortcut, choose properties, and then edit the icon from the properties dialog. Well, with system icons (i.e. your cd rom drive, or the find window) you cannot do this quite as easily...

One way to change these icons is to direclty edit C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll. This is the system file that stores all of these icons. You will need to open this file in ResHacker, replace the bmps inside that are used with the ones you want to use, and then save this file as something else temporarily (i.e. shell32_new.dll).

Then you would need to reboot into Safe Mode with command prompt, and run something like the following:



Then your pc should reboot, and when it comes up you should be seeing your new icons.


Well peeps, I don't think everyone should go altering their important system files, so thanks to a user over at Neowin, easier instructions have been posted.

All you really need to do is open up your registry editor (Start->Run->"regedit"<enter>) and do the following:

WARNING: Incorrectly modifying the registry can cause irrepairable damage or system instability. bfarber.com accepts no liability for edits that cause your system damage based on information found here or on other sites!

Navigate to the following key:


If there are any numbers in here already, you may easily modify then, else you will have to manually add new entries. All you do is right click and choose New->String Value, and then enter in the name as the number in the chart below of the icon you want to change. After you do this, right click that number, and choose Modify, and then enter in the path to the ico/bmp you want to use. It's that simple!

Here are the numbers, and what drive they co-relate to:

0-13 Drive and Application Icons

Other Icons


Please let us know if you run into any problems or have any other information to add to this list.

it is a great idia to change the "wonderful" Windows icons
however, when I go the way via registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIcons
the last Folder "ShellIcons" is not available in the entire registry. So what can I do?
could you post once again the entire path how it has to look like?
Maybe with the example of the open and closed folders?
thanks in adv

Hmm, neither did I. I would try avoiding doing this change in the registry with that being the case. Mess one thing up in there, whole system can be rendered useless.