Does it go away if you reboot? I have yet to find the cause, but it happened to me under Win2K Pro and continues to happen to me under Win XP Pro, where my icons will change as you describe, but if I change one back normally it fixes that one, and a reboot fixes the rest. Extremely strange and annoying, but it doesn't happen all the time, just seemingly at random, mostly after running a resource intensive program (read 'game'). I was using IE5.5 under Win2K, so I don't think it's an IE6 issue. The only difference is that mine happens to EXE files as well, in the case of EXE files the icons merely get swapped is the EXE file has only 1 icon included, or switched to an alternate one if the EXE has more than one choice. Pretty odd seeing a Fox head on WINZIP and a Paint Shop Pro icon on VFP.
If anyone ever figures this one out... I am totally current with patches and updates.

>Yesterday I installed the January 2002 edition of the MSDN Library and VS.Net. At the time, I noticed that the icon that was being used for it was the one associated with my icon editor. Not having the time to play with it then, I just got around to investigating this and some other side effects that seem to have occurred.
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>Side effect 1 is that icons in the Windows Explorer no longer display the contents of the file, but rather the editor associated with them.
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>Side effect 2 is that using a DLL (such as Shell32) which contains a number of icons do not use the icon referenced, but rather the DLL icon.
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>The only time this seems to work as it did is with an EXE file.
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>Side effect 3 is that all my folder setting in the Windows Explorer have been re-set to their default.
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>I don't know if this has something to do with the installation of IE 6.0 or not. The box is a Win2KPro SP2.