Hi, Could you please tell me where I can download the following icons,
either from the internet or my own pc. Microsoft Access, ExceL, Word,
Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher, Frontpage, Works, Internet Explorer
and the Windows logo. I am talking about the logos as seen on the
desktop. It doesnt really matter what version of office but XP would
be preferable. I have all these icons on my desktop (except the
windows logo of course) so maybe these pictures are hidden on my pc
somewhere. I will need to have these in gif or jpeg format to paste
into a document. I dont know if there is some legal/copywright issues
but this is only for a personal project and I wont be using them for
selling anything. Thank you for your help!

Hi philbert-ga!

I love icons, so I am pleased to tell you I know of a wonderful
program that will extract any, or all, of the icons from any program
on your hard drive, and give you the option to save them as gif's.

It's called "Icon Drive II"
http://www.genesoft.biz/icondv.htm
The free version allows only 50 icons at one time (from one file) to
be saved, but frankly it works so well I still highly recommend it,
even with the crippling feature. The evaluation version is uncrippled
in any other way.

Most exe's and dll's have much fewer than 50 icons anyway, and with a
$12.00 price tag, for the ease of use, and the fact it gives you the
option to view and select which ones you want, and to save any, or all
icons in a directory you choose, and to convert them (as you save
them) to gif files, I'd spring for it. I love the program. I never
once had to go to the help files -it's that easy to use.

From the web site:
..."If you've ever wished you could extract Icons from your EXE's or
DLL's
delete the duplicates and save selected icons as GIF's or Bitmaps
then Icon Drive II is the program for you...Icon Drive II is a
shareware program.  This evaluation version includes all features of
the program, but has a extract limit of 50 icons at any one time. If
you wish to remove the 50 icon limit, you are required to pay for the
program (see Register in the Help file for more details)..."

Let me know how you like it... 

Sincerely,
Cynthia

Search strategy:
Personal use and having tried several icon extractors in the past.

Perfect! Thanks Cynthia.
And thankyou mosquitohawk for your input.

They're 'hidden' inside your .dll and .exe files on your hard drive. 

I don't know where you can get them on the internet, but you can
probably find an icon editor program that'll let you extract them from
the above files.

For example, your Access icons might be located in the access.exe file
and so on. A lot of windows icons are in the .dll files.

This is too non-specific for me to claim the answer, but another
researcher is welcome to take my comment, add a little more and take
it.

You can also do a screen capture of your desktop. (Shift + Print Scrn)
Then you can paste the screen capture into MSPaint, use the selection
tool to cut out the icons you want and save them that way.
Probably a little less complicated than using another program.