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I was looking to theme my PC in an XP style but nowhere can I find a reliable way to replace my icons (i.e. Recycle Bin, Hard Drive, CD icons) with XP's. I was curious as to whether I could perhaps create an XP VM, pull the shell32 off it and replace my W7's. Alternatively, are there other avenues I could try?

Remona Minett
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  • You cannot use Windows 7 system files within Windows XP. – Ramhound Oct 07 '18 at 23:30
  • I want to replace the _Windows 7_ files with XP's, not the other way around. – Remona Minett Oct 07 '18 at 23:39
  • I would expect that to fail. Years ago I tried to replace the shell32.dll in NT4 with a somewhat different version designed for NT4. It would not boot. What you want to do is far more drastic. Windows expects the versions of system files to match. If you somehow got around that there would be other problems. – LMiller7 Oct 08 '18 at 00:48
  • If all you want is the icons, you may be able to pull them out of Windows XP's shell32.dll and transfer the icon files to Windows 7. Try using [IconsExtract](http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html). – Worthwelle Oct 08 '18 at 04:27

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No, you can't do that.

Shell32.dll is a core file of the operating system which provides the functionality needed to make the shell works (although it's a simplification the shell is more or less Desktop + Start menu + Windows Explorer). Yes, it has a lot of icons but only because that icons are used by the shell so they are stored the same place.

So changing that file would affect a very important part of Windows that need to be synchronized with the rest of files of the OS, even using another file from the same version of Windows but with a different Service Pack applied would make the operating system unbootable.

Anyway, nowadays you couldn't even try that because starting with Windows 2000) Microsoft added Windows File Protection (WFP/SFP), which maintain a copy of the core operating system files and if it detects that one of those files have been replaced it replaces it again from the backup copy.

mashuptwice
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Alberto Martinez
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  • Thanks. I appreciate the clarification. I will find another method. – Remona Minett Oct 09 '18 at 07:06
  • It have been a lot since I tinkered with this things, but I think that you can manually change a lot of that icons. What you can make is copy the shell32.dll from an XP system and put in *another* folder, and then manually point to that DLL when customizing the icons. That would not generate problems since you are keeping the Windows 7 DLL in place. – Alberto Martinez Oct 09 '18 at 11:43
  • It's been a long time since I asked this, in case someone else or myself ever need this - my solution was to simply rename shell32.dll to something like 'icons.dll' and move it into my Documents or somewhere in the system of C:\, manually navigating to it and selecting from the icons there. – Remona Minett Jan 01 '20 at 00:06
  • @RemonaMinett that won't work. It'll break immediately when Windows updates or when one runs `sfc /scannow` – phuclv Jul 30 '22 at 03:52
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To expand upon Alberto's answer, Windows/System File protection was added in Windows ME.

From Wikipedia - Windows File Protection:

Windows File Protection (WFP), a sub-system included in Microsoft Windows operating systems of the Windows 2000 and Windows XP era, aims to prevent programs from replacing critical Windows system files. Protecting core system files mitigates problems such as DLL hell with programs and the operating system. Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 include WFP under the name of Windows File Protection; Windows Me includes it as System File Protection (SFP).

Greenonline
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