Visual studio deployment and shortcut icons

[Shakti]

I have recently run into an extremely annoying problem at work:

I create an MSI installer project, add the primary output of another project and an icon file.

I then add a shortcut to the output on the desktop and on the start menu. Now the problem is I try to set the icon of the shortcut to be the icon I included in the installer project, but it won't work. The icon is still the generic windows 7 icon and not the icon i specify.

Has anybody else encountered this and has some tips on how to fix this? I know this may sound like a trivial thing but it just looks so damn lazy to ship software to a customer without a custom icon.

Edit: I am using Visual studio 2010 SP1 by the way.

[Shakti]

Found a solution. Looks like windows is really picky with icons and if the Sun isn't exacly lined up with Venus and Jupiter while Pluto does a loop it just won't work.

More serious solution: The icon needs to contain not just one icon but icons for alot of different sizes and color depths. The easiest way of doing this is to take an image (preferrably transparent background), open the image in this little program: Greenfish Icon Editor Pro Freeware download and reviews from SnapFiles and select Icon -> "Create icon from image" and make sure everything in the popup box is selected.

This was the easiest way to get it to work for me at least.