How to swap Icon of running Application in Taskbar (on Windows)

Question

I am using Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windos 2000.

There is a windows taskbar where each running application is represented by a rectangular button with an icon and a caption, one button per instance and per window. For example in cas of firefox, there are 3 Firefox windows that I created, there are 3 entries in the taskbar with the orange Firefox icon, one for each window. When I click one of the buttons in the taskbar the Firefox window that belongs to it becomes active, and goes visible to the front.

So far this is normal windows behaviour (I am not using "grouping" of the buttons)

I have a tool that hides some of the buttons in the taskbar (called "hideit"). Now I am looking for a tool that allows me to replace single icons in the taskbar of programs while they are running.

Please note, this would be a tool that manipulates the windows user interface (explorer.exe) and not the application that is running. A tool that manipulates the applications and their resources, I guess this would be called a resource editor, I am asking a seperate question for it here

So is there a tool out there for exchanging icons in the taskbar of the running appication, preferably per instance.

Answer 1

I couldn't really find a good solution to this, but you could try the following:

Install Winstep

This gives you a Windows 7 like taskbar under Windows XP, but I believe it also lets you pick the icon you want to use for the application.

The problem you have is you want different instances of the program use a different icon, while the application gets its icon from it's program files folder. So the only option, except for running an alternative taskbar, is running three different 'versions' of the applications which all point to a different icon (which probably gives you a huge overhead)...