Removing Steam Desktop Shortcut Arrow Icons

[Radiant]

I successfully removed the shortcut arrow icons from normal applications on Windows 8, but it didn't remove the arrows for steam icons. Is there a fix in which I don't have to download something?

[Sopwith]

I had added a bunch of non-steam games to my list before a reformat, for which I had assigned different icon files in the same root folders. I had no problems prior to that point. But upon re-launching steam afterwards, I was assaulted by these infernal shortcut arrows on all of them. I tried getting rid of them in my OS with registry hacks, but nothing worked. (My old OS was 32-bit, and my new one is 64-bit - don't know if that makes a difference.)

The root problem here is that when you tell Steam to launch a non-steam program and then set the icon to something different, it creates that shortcut arrow by default.

There are three solutions that I found:

1) Use "Vista Shortcut Overlay Remover": Google, download and install this program. Run it and select "No arrow", then "Apply" and restart your computer. If you're lucky like me and the original poster of this idea ((SAS)U ID10T), then all those annoying shortcut arrows in Steam (as well as those for shortcut arrows over your entire OS) will disappear, and you will rejoice. Steam uses system resources / references to create its arrow icon, hence why (the right) registry hacks can work. This may not work on Windows 8, I wouldn't know.

2) Inject an icon into your launch program: For this you will need to download and install "Resource Hacker" (http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/). You begin by resetting the launch properties of the non-steam game (or just re-adding it), and then (first, make a back-up copy of it in case this breaks something in your game) right-click on it in Windows Explorer and select "Open Using Resource Hacker". Then under Action -> Replace Icon. You'll need to locate the .EXE or .ICO you want to use (see below if you need to extract .ICOs from other files), then save and overwrite the original file. This should remove the annoying arrow, since we're not telling Steam to use a separate icon entity -- the program itself has the icon we want.

3) Extract or use icon picture files: You can use a program like "ByCyIconGrabber" to extract the icon files and save them as .PNG's, then link them as an icon file/image in Steam. The downside of this is that is in the "Detail View" layout of Steam, the icon appears tiny in the detail screen, where it should be larger. But there is no annoying arrow.