I can find plenty of topics in this forum about creating desktop shortcuts, changing the size of those icons, displaying icons, adding, deleting or restoring shortcut arrows, but I can't seem to find anything that addresses my problem:

I got my wife a new Windows 10 laptop for Christmas. She uses IE11 and AOL webmail and she wanted a shortcut on her desktop. I opened her AOL email, clicked file on the Menu Bar, clicked Send, and finally clicked Shortcut to Desktop. Closing out of her email I observed the little AOL icon on her desktop. I right-clicked it, renamed it AOL Mail, and removed the number of emails which were parenthetically included in the icon text. I double-clicked the icon, making sure that it took me to her inbox.

Everything was good until my wife rebooted when we found that the AOL icon changed itself into this ugly blue globe. Every thing I found on the internet has not worked to change the icon back. Only deleting the icon and recreating it works. Of course, that's silly - the computer knew what the icon was originally and, presumably where it was stored.

How do I change this icon and make it 'stick'?

Thanks for your reply Shawn. Before I read your response I was busy doing some non-tenforums solution searching and I ran across someone who posted that their icon cache needed to be rebuilt since it had become corrupted. That poster was also getting the blue globes as his IE desktop shortcuts.

I saw no earthly reason why the icon cache would have become 'corrupted' in a brand new laptop, but it triggered a memory about something I'd read in another tenforums tutorial. Sure enough, here is another of your splendid tutorials -
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html. I used Option One - To Rebuild the Icon Cache using a BAT file. Downloaded it, ran it, and the icon for my wife's AOL Webmail went back to what it was when I first created it. You mention in your other tutorial (the one you supplied a link for) that those icons are stored in the folder C:\Users\User-Name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. I assume that they would be in the same location on a W10 computer? I can't really check here, since the wife is busy catching up on all the 'wonderful' (cough) information she'd missed on Facebook.

Hello,
in the properties of my shortcuts web document was missing. I found a reg file:

Restore Default File Type Associations in Windows 10 Windows 10 Tutorials

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.url]
@="InternetShortcut"

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.url]

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Roaming\OpenWith\FileExts\.url]

applied it, restarted my machine and now all is working fine. I can change the icons of my shortcuts again.

This tutorial no longer works for internet shortcuts, thanks to Microsoft's endlessly frustrating penchant for fixing things that are not broken. In this case, they have changed something that works into something that doesn't.

Used to be that when you created an internet shortcut for your desktop (or dragged a URL from the address bar to your desktop) it would work exactly the same way as a shortcut to any path on your PC. You could edit it, change the path, and customize the icon. Now, the geniuses at Microsoft have decided to make internet shortcuts created with either of the ways above, into ".url" files, and guess what? There is no way to customize them.

There is a workaround, however. You can take the .url file and hide it away somewhere else on your computer, and put a shortcut to that .url file on your desktop, then you can edit that. Trust Microsoft to make a simple task more difficult. Idiots one and all!