If you’re using Windows Vista, there’s a good chance that you have an Internet Explorer 7 desktop. If not, it’s easy to add an IE7 icon to the desktop.

  1. Open the Start menu and type “netstat -a”. This will show you all of the network connections on your computer.
  2. In the “Connection Status” section, look for “Internet Explorer”. If it’s not listed, then add it by typing “IE” into the text box and pressing Enter.
  3. Click on the “Add Icon” button and select a PNG or GIF image of your favorite IE7 icon from your computer’s Pictures folder.
  4. Click on OK to add the icon to your desktop.

The main benefit to using this icon instead of a shortcut is that you can quickly get to the Internet Options page by right-clicking and choosing Properties.

You’ll notice that you can also use “Start Without Add-ons”, which is helpful for troubleshooting problems.

To add this icon back, we’ll need to use a registry hack. You can either follow along and manually create the registry entries, or you can skip down further and just download the registry file.

Manual Registry Hack

Open regedit.exe using the Start menu search or run box, and then navigate down to the following key:

In the right-hand pane, add a new 32-bit DWORD value with the following name and value:

You should be able to right-click on the desktop and choose Refresh, and the new icon should show up.

Value: 0

Downloadable Registry Hack

Simply download and extract the registry hack file and then double-click on it to enter the information into the registry. You can right-click the desktop and select Refresh, or you could log off and back on if that doesn’t work for some reason.

To remove the icon, right-click on it and choose Delete.

Download AddIEIconToDesktop Registry Hack