Earlier this week I wrote about making use of the Windows Icon Set embedded in system DLL files. While this can be handy, it becomes somewhat of a burden finding the right DLL file with the icons you want to use. To eliminate this problem, simply extract the icon files with NirSoft’s IconsExtract.

This nifty utility allows you to select a file and it pulls all the icon and cursor files out which you can then save individually. Additionally, you can scan an entire directory (or drive) using a wildcard match, such as “\Windows\system32\*.dll” to pull out all embedded items in one swoop. This works great when you don’t know which DLL files have embedded icons.

When I ran an extract on my Vista installation on the system32 directory it found over 2,500 icons, so this is definitely a quick way to find the one you want.