Permanent Spontaneous Icon Change problem

Recently I believe I noticed a change in the icon displayed when I create a new folder on the desktop.

The new icon looks like a manila folder wrapped with string one time horizontally and one time vertically.

This appears to be a permanent change.

The old icon looked like a manila folder without the string.
At least this is what I remember: One of those things you don't really pay attention to and then you think you see a subtle change but are not sure.

Would appreciate any advice as to what may have caused this change if it actually occured and how to correct this.

This string pattern can be faintly seen on folders displayed in Windows Explorer.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Iconic--Have no idea what caused the string, but if you like it, enjoy!!
However if you want the old icon back you could try using TweakUI|Repair tab|Rebuild icons.
http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/PowerToys/Networking/NTTweakUI.asp
P.S. I have no clue whether this will help in Win95, but here are pictures of all the Win98 icons, their location in Windows and their coordinate numbers.
http://www.mvps.org/serenitymacros/icon.html
Click on "Shell Icons" when you get to that site.

 

Jim,

Thank you for the information.

I do not like it because I did not knowingly make it happen.

Tried the tweak repair with no change resulting.

The icon is not on the list at Serenity so it apparently may not be a standard window icon which concerns me.

What bothers me is that someone may have hacked in despite the firewall and diliberately or inadvertently made the change and done who knows what else.

When I start shut down, the upper left and lower right quadrants formed by the strings turn purple.

Thanks again

 

Iconic--Sorry to hear you still have the strings (sound nice to me, especially for the holidays ).
But seriously, I presume you have antivirus and spyware detector/preventer programs on your PC. Might be worth a scan with the latter.
Scanners:
AdAware
http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download/
SpybotS&D
http://security.kolla.de/
And a proactive program that runs in the back ground (no need to scan).
With all of these you do have to update their reference files about once a week.