Before I had litestep installed, I used Iconpackager to change the folder icons in Windows. Once Litestep was the shell, it changed the folder icons back to the windows default and I cant override it anymore. Is there a way I can make Litestep NOT do that?

LiteStep doesn't actively do that. There's no code which purposely changes the icons back to their original.

Instead, the customized icons are never loaded. For some reason M$ put the code responsible for loading the icons into explorer.exe; but of course this is completely undocumented. We have no idea what we need to do in order to load these icons. All replacement shells suffer from this problem.

There is workaround...

Replacer
Resource Hacker
Setsfc
and some icons

?huh
{There is workaround..]
so there is no solution : / if there is none it makes me sad.

mockba: Immortal is right, resource hacking works.

Yeah, I noticed the same problem: I'm running the latest release candidate and tried to use IconPhile to change everything, even as far as rebuilding the icon cache, but to no avail.

It's strange, though: various file types' icons change, like all my videos and music, and even Windows-specific things change like the control panel and the program group, my computer, my documents, etc. Drives change consistently as well. It's mainly folders that get knocked back to ugly Windows default.

I tried switching to Explorer, and as this thread led me to believe, the icons did what they were supposed to do.

Will this be fixed in a future build, do you think? (Hopefully soon...it's a small problem in a great shell that doesn't change functionality, but it's annoying nonetheless. No big deal though, I use & love Litestep regardless.)

i think this is a very annoying problem. when i go for desktop customization... i expect everything to be different. Changing icons is a big part of that. unfortunately it doesnt work well without explorer. I never thought the login screen delay with litestep would ever be solved... but it has... so i hope this will be done as well... when somebody figures out how to do it ... :)

The login screen delay has been solved? Really? I'm still pressing ctrl-alt-del to skip... Is this the latest release candidate or a module?

Litestep beta build RC3. right there on downloads. (Thanks to ilmcuts)

There is a big difference between changing the icons for associated applications and folders inside of the os. Some applications out there allow you to trick Explorer into loading another icon...however the same tricks don't work for LS because something explorer does is not there. In time it may get fixed...but as with the XP login problem...it could take years.

well since explorer is needed for all these fucntions... i tried out litestep over explorer. and it works like a charm.
Its better to run explorer then litestep rather than running litestep and then explorer as your file manager.

I added these lines to my personal.rc:



and also modified the default hotkeys defined in the installer so that they wont conflict with those of windows. e.g WIN E for explorer and WIN R for RUN....

finally i added LiteStep to my startup entires through regedit.

A lot of problems now are solved. Icons sure work without any problem. I noticed the whole thing to tun a little faster. Also most of the flickering is now gone. donno if its because of this.

All said and done, i am pretty satisfied with what i have now. The combo runs pretty fine and teh memory requirements are the same as before. (file manager+shell)

I did some more changes but i dont know if they were needed. I think LiteStep should be the first program to run after explorer if all systray items are to be loaded.

overall... problem solved for the time being. :)

just when i thought i was through with it... the systray is all messed up now. it updates in windows taskbar... but not in LS....

I prepared this if anyone is interested.
Tutorial for changing icons in winxp
http://www.modleague.com/immortal/Tutorial.zip

Sweet, I'll try it...

@Immortal--I tried that tutorial, using the replacement .DLLs, but to no avail. It probably has to do with the fact that I'm running WIN2k instead of XP, and I would delve further and try to get it to work if I wasn't messing with such important files.

Anyway, thanks for your work. It's a pretty cool & easy to use.

I tried the lshideexplorer trick as well, and interestingly, you're right, the mem usage is about the same. Who'd've thunk explorer would take less than 5 megs of memory to run! (It's actually taking just under five megs at the moment, but for a bit there LS and explorer were taking about 2 a piece.)

But my problem isn't with the tray not updating; instead, some icons appear in my LS tray, while others appear in my explorer tray. (Right now, my Bluetooth software's tray icon is in LS, as well as my Yahoo! messenger icon, but my system's sounds icon and everything else i start with a tray icon is showing up in explorer.)

This is an interesting little problem, I wonder if there's a way around it...

Yeah any icons that are loaded just after litestep starts are loaded in the litestep systray( considering that Litestep is the first program that loads, and the rest after it ).
After that all icons are loaded only in the windows system tray.
This is the only thing that is preventing me to actually use litestep and explorer together. They work wonderfully well otherwise.
Hope there is a workaround...

but isnt (most of) the point of litestep to rif yourself of the resource hogging beast?

well if u use explorer.exe as ur file manager then it doesnt make any difference. cuz the memory usage is the same... (explorer.exe+litestep.exe)...

and most of the time my filemanager is open...