A tiny little modification to XP. If you prefer not to see the shortcut arrow icon in the bottom corner of the shortcut, use this hack to change it—or even remove it.
To delete the icon, remove the entry IsShortCut from the following keys:
HCR\lnkfile (in “lnkfile”, it’s a small “ell,” not an “I”)
HCR\piffile
HCR\InternetShortcut
To change the icon, go to:
HLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons
Change the String Value entries for the setting “29” to the path and filename of the new icon. Setting this value to blank has the same effect as deleting them, but without any side effects.
By deleting the icon, Windows no longer considers these shortcuts as shortcuts. There maybe some side effect in using the shortcuts after this change: in some cases, deleting the arrow for .LNK files leads to duplicate items in the Explorer context menu. Ideally, rather than deleting the icon, just remove the file path to be on the safe side.
