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Some things you
must know
There are some additional things to know when we’re replacing
our files. In the specific case of my set of files, their use
is mainly intended to update the icons of your system, and maybe
you’ll be unable to see the changes unless you do some steps
more.
About icons files. Well, now we have our system
updated with new system files, but all looks exactly the same!
What happen? The icons in your Windows XP system are stored in
several files, almost all of them in .dll format, but
some of them are in .cpl format also (the .cpl
files are containers of the icons used in the Control Panel, that's
the only difference for this specific case).
Rebuilding icon cache. What this mean? Windows
uses an icon’s cache. That's because could be too hard and
heavy (talking about memory) to handle the big amount of icons
needed to draw the full GUI every Windows start. So instead, Windows
store in this cache only the most commonly used icons and then
it read the cache at every start. It's a good feature, but we'll
need to defeat it or we won't be able to see the changes made
to our system. Once updated a system file, you'll need to re-build
your icon cache in order to see your new icons.
How to do it? Sadly, there is no way to do it using the standard
Windows tools, because Microsoft doesn't care about the emulation
community. So here we'll need help of an external app, called
Power Toys XP (developed by Microsoft). It's
absolutely free, and can be found in the download section of Microsoft.com:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp?
Specifically, we'll need only a part of PowerToys, called TweakUI.
So maybe you'd like to install only this feature, not the full
package. Anyway, once installed, open TweakUI,
and in the "Repair" section
you'll see the "Rebuild Icons"
option checked in the pull down menu. Just click over the "Repair
Now" button and you'll be able to see your
new icons, enjoy!
Files not updated even rebuilding the cache.
There are some special files that will need a full reboot after
updating. This is the case of Shell32.dll and
Explorer.exe files, wich sometimes won't update
unless you do a full reboot.
 List
of system files
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