Icon Creator

This is for the techies out there.

The bar at the bottom of my screen is filled with shortcuts, half of which look like boring yellow folders.

Any recomendations for an icon-editor? Nothing fancy, preferably free or with a good long trial period.

Thanks,

Cricket

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

Thanks for the suggestion, Meridian, but it doesn't work.

Tried MS Paint, the free one with Windows 2000. Won't save as .ico. When I save as bmp and change the extension, then change the shortcut to use that icon, I get something that looks decidedly random.

And, when I try to open a .ico file with MS Paint, it says it can't read the file type, even after I change the extension to .bmp.

So, I'm open to other suggestions. I really don't like just trying random ones from downloads.com or tucows -- we've had enough trouble with the system after that sort of exploration that I'm gunshy. I prefer to use ones friends recommend.

Cricket

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

I probably should have said that you need to save it as 16 colours or 256 colours. The default seems to be 24-bit bitmap and I don't think that will work. But I've just tried this here and 16 colour and 256 colour both work fine as icons once renamed to .ico.

__________________

Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny."

Hmmm, well, I've tried this on some more icons on my PC now and I haven't had a problem with most of them in Paint after renaming them as .bmp. But in Paint Shop Pro, I can't open some of them, and if I edit, save and rename those in Paint, they come out a different size and don't look quite the same. The colours come out duller, so I assume it's losing some pallette information.

So, they're not as much the same as I thought. But only some of them. Perhaps it depends on the way the original icon was created?

If your spouse has a copy of Dev Studio, some versions of that have an icon editor.

__________________

Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny."

Paint, version 5, 1999.

We've got Dev Studio, but it's not installed. I remember it mucked things up, so I've no incentive to put it back on.

Think I was saving as 24-bit bitmap. I'll try the other options.

Thanks for the ideas!

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl