Control Panel Item Icons (Windows XP)

Question

Control Panel items are normally registered under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace, however a lot of the built-in panels aren't listed there, such as the Automatic Updates item.

I'm trying to find out where the icon used for the Automatic Updates item is. If you open the Control Panel in Tiles mode (48x48 icons) you'll see the icon is being scaled up, yet all of the icon resources in all of the Windows Update files have 48x48 subimages, so I can't figure this one out.

It's a similar story with the NVidia control panel item: the icon is black and seemingly downscaled from a subimage larger than 48x48, yet the actual nvidia control panel files don't contain this black icon (instead they have the silver version). When I create a Shortcut to the control panel item and inspect its binary bits there is no path to the icon specified, just to the cpl file itself (with the totally different icon). I've checked the registry and there aren't any clues in there either.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Control Panel applets can be registered in several different ways, or not at all (if they reside in the %system% folder):

Registering Control Panel Items

If an applet does not register its icon information in the Registry, then the applet has to provide the icon information when requested by the Control Panel via the CPL_INQUIRE and/or CPL_NEWINQUIRE messages to its CPLApplet() entry point, in which case the applet has no idea what size icon to return. It sounds like maybe you are running into that scenario.