All shortcut icons on desktop are hearts

[Bucksnort]

My cousins puter sometime ago (unsure when) started having this problem. All shortcut icons on desktop are now heart icons and if I try to change the icon back to the original its prevented. If you make a new shortcut on desktop it momentarily shows the correct icon then the heart icon appears. Virus scan shows nothing with latest virus definitions. The icons have a red outer border with a large white heart in the center. Has anyone seen this before or any clue what the crap culprit is? He's running win me. Thanks.

 

[BlueWeasel]

You need to repair the desktop icons.

The best way to do this is install and use TweakUI. It's a great free program from MS that does a whole lot more than repair icons.

TweakUI

Note there are 2 versions of TweakUI: one for 98/ME/2000 and another for WinXP.

 

[Bucksnort]

Windows icons are not affected by this problem, ie, recycle bin, network, etc. Just shortcut icons and like i say something is preventing changing them back and any new application shortcut formed is changed to a heart. I need to find out what is doing this and get rid of it (application, undetected virus, etc).. Tweak ui will not affect this problem. A search on symantec about the symptoms yielded no results. Anyone seen this problem before?

 

[Doh!]

I believe the shortcut icon is resident within the shell32.dll file. Unless you've messed with shell32.dll, the original shortcut icon should be still there. In this case, running tweakui's repair icon option will fix it. If you installed any applications that apparently changed the shell32.dll default icons, you can either do a repair OS option with the CD (if you have XP) or use a third-party system icon changing programs (i.e., stardock's iconpackager, IconShop, or Microangelo) to change the shortcut icon. Another option is to use ResourceHack to change the icon.

If you haven't tried tweakui, give it a try.