ico. icons keep defaulting

I donwloaded some ico. format icons for my desktop but after I replace an icon with one I look up later and the icon has defaulted back to the windows white square icon. I am running win98 as my os. Any suggestions?

TIA

 

I don't play with icons very often but it could be your icon cache is at it's limit, it's either 2000kb or 4000kb can't remember which.

To check look in C:\WINDOWS for a hidden system file called ShellIconCache, if it's over either of the two sizes just delete it & reboot, Windows will recreate the file when it loads. There's also a registry entry you can change, if I could find it again I'd tell you where it is.

The file is safe to delete, it increases in size as you install programs & such but never decreases when you uninstall them so the icon cache just keeps growing in size to it's limit at which point icons start doing strange things.

 

thanks wanting makes perfect sense!