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From: elmanad@leland.Stanford.EDU (Adam Elman)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Icons and *.ICO Files
Message-ID: <1991May8.193851.21056@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 8 May 91 19:38:51 GMT
References: <00948496.3FF72760@cgevs3.cem.msu.edu>
Organization: AIR, Stanford University
Lines: 34

In article <00948496.3FF72760@cgevs3.cem.msu.edu> user2@cgevs3.cem.msu.edu (Stephen Medlin) writes:
>I'm wondering if someone can provide a reason for an empirical discovery that I 
>made:  Before I put a larger hard disk on my computer, I was running out of
>room--I had killed most of the obvious things and I decided that I would
>get rid of all of my icon files (both EXE and ICO files).  I assumed that
>all of the icons that I had assigned to group items would be gone and I
>would be left with the default PROGMAN icons.  Lo' to my surprise, I still
>have all of the icons "stuck" to the items.  I had expected that windows
>read in the icons at boot time and applied them to the groups, but that
>is not obviously what it does.  It seems to me that this is a really neat
>feature/bug, because I can now keep all of my icons on floppy, apply new 
>icons to new entries, and keep the *.ICO files off the HD.  Can someone
>let me know why Win3 does this and/or any reasons to not do this (other than
>the slowness of accessing icons from floppy).  Otherwise, this is a great
>trick for people out there with limited HD space (now a days, even 40 MB 
>is too small).  
>
>If I get enough replies, I will summarize and re-post.
>
>Stephen Medlin

Actually, this is a well-known feature.  Program Manager stores the
icons for files in the .grp files for each group.  It only reads the
original .ico file when you click on the "change properties" selection
in the menu.  If you do that, of course, and the icon is not in the
path that ProgMan thinks it is, the icon will return to the default.

Of course, this is easily fixed, and there is actually absolutely no
reason not to store all your icons on a floppy -- you only really need
them when you want to change or install them.

Later,
Adam Elman
elmanad@leland.stanford.edu