Shortcut Arrow Icon - Change, Remove, or Restore in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Hello Koi Boy, and welcome to Ten Forums. :)

Did you just download the .reg in step 2 of OPTION ONE today? It's a newer version that doesn't have that issue, and will fix it from the last version.

Just downloaded new version of .REG ...... ALL NOW WORKS GREAT

Thank you..

Brink...

somehow, I got those images in there. Grrrr!

Option one killed my ability to pin program icons to my start menu or taskbar, in regard to Option 2 I have no shellIcons folder in my Windows 10 registry??

Try re-downloading the .reg file from Option One. It was updated to allow pinning icons to the taskbar.

There's a note under Option 2:

"If you do not have the Shell Icons key, then right click or press and hold on the Explorer key, click/tap on New, click/tap on Key, type Shell Icons for the name, and press Enter."

Thanks m8 i musta missed all this somehow - doh LOL

If anyone tried Brink's solutions but still hasn't been able to get rid of the transparent squares, try using

%windir%\System32\shell32.dll,50

as the data value for 29 instead. This fixed the issue for me beautifully.

Thanks to all those who have been updating this thread.

Followup: found the culprit for the transparent square issue. Both the registry edit and the direct fix in the OP use a resource from imagres.dll in System 32. I went into that file and found this at imageres.dll,-17:

Emphasis mine.

The bad news is that both solutions in the OP are drawing from that resource, which is definitely not a transparent image. So I think that everybody who's used either solution will have the transparent squares, whether they've noticed them or not.

The good news is that it's only using the wrong image, not screwing with anything deeper, so the fix is simple. imageres.dll doesn't have any completely transparent images - just a few ones that are passable at first glance - so you have to go into shell32.dll, where the other shortcut icons are located. Anything between %windir%\System32\shell32.dll,-50 and shell32.dll-53 is transparent and will work. You can also use any of the other .ico files located there.

Soothing trees, to calm my wrath after dealing with this thing.

shell32.dll,-50 shell32.dll,-51 shell32.dll,-52 aren't transparent for me. they're images or printers or such. I guess I'll just use a custom blank .ico.

edit: I'm stupid, I was using imageres.dll instead of shell32.dll values