As far as I know, shellstyles do not contain icons, but rather resource data for theming, such as how the start menu will be displayed. For example, a XP theme I used quite a few years ago removed the Start text from the start menu and replaced the green button with the image of Sonic.

Icons have always been separate from the visual/shell styles, afaik.

To map icons the way you want, you would need to use the Registry.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k@gmail.com> wrote:
I think I read somewhere that shellstyle.dll (that's the name) can
contain icons (and I guess effects as well) but I'm not 100% sure. I
would guess that we need to download some themes which have a
shellstyle and see what's in it.

Roderick

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:27 AM, Joel Holdsworth
<joel@airwebreathe.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 16:02 +0200, Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
>> As of XP themes can specify their own icons. For some dlls I believe
>> shell32 they need to provide their own shellapi.dll or whatever it is
>> called. I think that would be the way to proceed. I would suggest to
>> make Tango the base theme as it integrates well with KDE/Gnome and
>> also OSX. Using themes (some of the infrastructure for it is missing
>> though) you would be able to override the Tango icons.
>
> Are you sure that includes the user32 icons? I know it works for shell
> objects, but I didn't think it could apply to anything that didn't have
> a PIDL!
>
>
>