SHELL32.DLL issues in Windows NT 4.0

[ppgrainbow]

Okay, when I installed Windows NT 4.0 Workstation under VirtualPC, the 256 colour icons displayed on the desktop remained intact. With TweakUI installed, you could remove the annoying arrows from desktop shortcut icons and with the Desktop Themes from the Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit, you had the ability to change desktop icons.

However, installing Internet Explorer 4.01 SP2 with Active Desktop support broke the ability to add or remove the arrows on the desktop shortcut icons and eventually defeated the ability to use Desktop Themes to properly change desktop icons.

To make matters worse, the security update KB313829 even broke the ability to properly remove annoying arrows from Desktop shortcut icons!

While this is not a issue under all editions of Windows 95, I bet that this affected users running Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition. Additionally after the updates to Windows 95 have been installed, you could always install Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 to get the 256 colour desktop icons.

The current version of SHELL32.DLL installed in the C:\WINDOWS\System32 directory is 4.72.3812.600 with the date stamp of 2001-12-06 14:23:20. I checked this page regarding the patched SHELL32.DLL bug and it doesn't seem to be too much of a help here.

And the SHELL32.DLL fix is only designed for Windows 98 and may eventually not work correctly under Windows NT 4.0 as the size of the file is smaller.

Is there a way to fix this complicated issue without having to re-install Windows NT 4.0? I know for sure that simply only removing the arrows is not going to be enough here.

Edited November 2, 2013 by ppgrainbow