I'm looking for a good icon editor for windows. Does anyone have some good recommendations?
IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macintosh icons supporting transparency.
How about using any general graphics editing program to create the image you would like (paintshop, photoshop, ms paint, gimp, etc) then use a conversion utility to convert the image to a *.ico file?
An example would be create a .png file in photoshop, then use png2ico (a free utility, search google for it).
I've used it for coding projects, where I wanted to store the resources on SVN in png form, then generate ico's from different revisions of the png's.
If you have Visual Studio 2008 Standard or Professional edition then you can get Axialis IconWorkshop Lite for free.