i was wondering if there was a program out there that you can edit icons with... and then save them as ICO files? i dunno if this make sense causei actually have no clue...
I use Microangelohttp://www.impactsoft.com/ for the majority of my work, but if you want to do icon colour tinting and colour alterations get Icon Collector Graphics Editorhttp://www.greatowl.com/ it's got some handy features that Microangelo doesn't have.
Also, if your looking for freeware XP icon editors you might also want to try these two apps: