Icon for pinned taskbar shortcut reverts to target icon when opened

If you pin an item to the taskbar, you can change the icon for that pinned item. Right? No problem. My problem is that when I click on that pinned item, the icon I chose for the shortcut goes away and Windows displays the icon coded into this particular .EXE file.

I cannot use Resource Hacker since I'm on an office computer and things are a bit locked down. My office computer only got upgraded to Windows 10 today and I've literally spent the whole day adjusting the odd things I don't like.

Berton said:

Not necessarily. Win10 [and probably Win8.0/8.1] has made a lot of changes with the Icons and Tiles on the Start menu and also on the Taskbar. One can still create a Shortcut on the Desktop to an installed program then usually right-click that Shortcut and either drag it to the Taskbar or right-click and Pin to the Taskbar or Pin to Start. Might be able to use Properties and Change Icon but a number of programs may show only the default. I used to know which Windows files contained other icons but haven't needed to play with that in quite awhile. A few versions back I had a small program that would extract all the icons to store in a Folder, can't even remember the name of it.

I just created a shortcut to an executable on my home desktop. I changed the icon to the shortcut on the desktop. Then, I pinned that shortcut to my taskbar. When I opened the program from the taskbar, the icon for the taskbar shortcut did not change.

On my work desktop, the taskbar icon changes when I click on it. It goes from the icon I specified to the icon that is "embedded" (for lack of better terminology) in the target .EXE. What is up with that?