New and old InstallShield 12 Setup.exe files suddenly have no icon in windows

Question

My team has used the same Install Shield 12 project for years. Several weeks ago Windows Explorer in Vista and Win7 stopped displaying icon sizes above 16x16 for the installer. So List, Details, and Small views show the 16x icon but Tile, Thumbnail, Medium and Large views are just text.

This is true for new installers, but also for 3 years of archived installers. We have not tried systems older than Vista, but we have tried it on multiple machines. We use a normal 32x32 32bit ICO file. In IrfanView it has two pages with a blank first page. In InstallShield it has one Icon to choose from at index 0. None of this has changed in the last three years.

I've dug around on the Flexera forums, here, and in various Google results but I haven't discovered anything except that quite a few people still use Install Shield 12.

Does anyone know what happened or how to fix it?

I suspect that there has been a recent windows update that changed the rules. Do we need to include an ICO containing different sizes? Does windows now restrict something that the older versions of Install Shield does?

Answer 1

I changed tactics. Instead of trying to understand why our old ICO suddenly stopped working I just created a new ICO. I made an effort to create exactly what Windows would expect in an ICO.

A quick and dirty search for application icon editors turned up IcoFX (this link goes to an free older version). Even Stack Overflow contributors recommended it. I fed it a pristine 256x256 png and told it to "Create Windows Icon From Image" using its default settings: - 4bit @ 16x16, 32x32 - 8bit @ 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 - 32bit @ 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, 256x256

This new ICO worked, although I had to rebuild my Windows icon cache to see the change.

I'm disappointed that I don't know what changed in the OSes. However, this solved the problem and also dramatically improved our old 32x32 pixel by 32bit ICO.