Changing icons

I recently installed Icon Packager and subsequently uninstalled it. However, afterward some of my icons got screwed up. Specifically, the jpeg, control panel, and printer icons. How do I change these back to the originals? I am using Windows 2000.

Get TweakUI (One of microsoft's powertoys: http://www.microsoft.com/powertoys)

and have the shell icon cache rebuilt.

It should fix it.

is it under the "repair" folder? If so, it didn't repair the icons.

Ok, try this:

Close all the possible applications and tasks and services in the system, so to minimize the disk access acrivity.

DELETE the file C:\WINNT\SHELLICONCACHE

It is hidden, so you may want to change its attriburtes first, or configure win to show hidden files.

After you did so, wait for a while to make sure there's no (or almost no) activity on disk.

Then reset your pc. You really have to bypass the shutdown procedure because that would recreate the shelliconcache file with the wrong info your pc has in memory. Yes, it really is a brutal reset, so make sure there's no activity on disk. Not a big big problem in NTFS. If you are on FAT than it may be a problem.
Anyway, when your pc reboots the problem should be fixed. Or, at least, you will know that the shelliconcache file is not responsible for the icon change.

If this does not work, then maybe the Icons where really reassigned in the registry, and a poor uninstall procedure did not restore them to their own original applications; in this case you will have to reassign them manually in the registry, which could be painful it the wrong icon assignments are many.

Sounds to me like your icon associations are hosed. If you have a poke in the registry, for example at:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jpg

...you'll see that the "(Default)" value is (or should be) "jpegfile". Go and look this up:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile

Under this, there's another key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\DefaultIcon

The "(Default)" value for this is the location of the icon to be used for .jpg files. It probably points to the package that you just removed.

Note that (sometimes), the "DefaultIcon" key is under the extension key (.jpg), rather than the name key (jpegfile).

I don't know what the correct values should be -- it varies among versions of Windows (and I'm running XP on this box), but if this is the case, then we're a step closer to figuring it out.

You really have to bypass the shutdown procedure because that would recreate the shelliconcache file with the wrong info your pc has in memory.

I seem to remember doing this in the past by booting into Safe Mode (or maybe even Command-Line-Only Safe Mode) and deleting it, and Safe Mode doesn't have that shutdown rebuild or something. Then again, I could be remembering incorrectly.