This is a custom start menu button/icon that I cooked up to replace Windows 7’s little blue orb with the logo in it. Instead of that Orb, this gives you Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor which responds to mouse-over and click in it’s own way (normal state, charged/glowing state, and firing state). It’s simple, it’s clean and it looks awesome when you’re rocking an Iron Man theme across Windows. You can find my Windows Logon Screen Wallpapers here to go with it. Instructions on how to set this as your icon are located below the image.

Note: Keep the image in .bmp format or else it will not be usable.

In order to change the icon in your start menu you will have to use a tool. Here is “Windows 7 Start Button Changer” which can do this for you. Make sure, for your own peace of mind, that you set a Windows Restore point just in case. You can never be too careful when playing with Windows’ UI.

Right click on the exe and choose to open it as admin (feel free to scan it before hand with your favorite anti-virus. I used 2 different ones and its nice and clean for me).

It will give you two options, one will be to search for the image above that you should have saved to your PC somewhere and set that as your new icon and the other option restores your original Windows 7 icon back (in case you decide to just set things back to normal).

Keep in mind, that when you set the new icon, the app will close all running sessions of Explorer.exe and restart it which will result in any “Windows Explorer” window that you may have open closing and your task bar will vanish for a moment before it brings it back by restarting explorer.exe’s process. So make sure you are not working in Windows Explorer (file browser) when you make the change.

Done! It is simple as that!

If you wish to share this with others, please simply link back to this article to do so. That way the other person(s) will be able to see the full instructions. Thank you.