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How can I batch decompile icon files?

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kunkel321:
It seems I've become obsessed with collecting Windows Icons (and icon sets).  I guess it's a hobby. 
There are some pretty cool free sets out there on the web...  This weekend I realized that the motherload of icons is right inside my own Windows operating system...

I use Total Commander (not free)to filter out all the DLLs in my C: Drive, then one of the user-created TC plugins (free) lets me filter out the DLLs that have icons in them. 
I use Nirsoft IconsExtract (free) to extract the icons.  There were nearly 8000 of them, and many are quite nice! 
I then use another TC plugin to group the icons by whether or not they have hi-rez components (1167 do, lots of duplicates, though).

What I'd like to do now is make them so that they all have the same components:  32 bit, 256x256, down to 16x16, and get rid of the ugly low-bit ones. 
I'm finding that Windows has a hard time displaying them in a consistent way....  If I open a window in large thumbnail view, some of the icons will appear large, but others are small.  I can only assume that Windose is preferring a smaller 32 bit over a larger 8 or 4 bit (?).  Anyway, I found that IcoFX (free old version) will let me bulk convert images to ICOs.  AND... It will let me "convert" from ICO to ICO.  Since it lets you decide your own bit depth and sizes, I'm able to make my set uniform.  UNFORTUNATELY IcoFX seems to do this by taking the largest embedded PNG and re-sizing it to the different dimensions. 

Note how the top (pre-conversion) one is sharper than the bottom.  This is especially noticeable on the 16px one, were the original actually has a separate, low-detail version of the artwork, but the bottom one is an anti aliased smear of the larger image.

So the question:  How do I get all of those ugly 4 and 8 bit sub-cons out of there?

OR... Is there any software (think "free") that will actually convert like IcoFX does, but use the original size for the conversion?  (e.g. use the original 16x16 if there is one, otherwise, shrink the larger one).
Does that make sense?

mouser:
I wouldn't mind hearing about a tool that could batch cleanup .ico files as well (removing icons above or below a certain resolution).

Curt:
Quite a number of the "icons" on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 are in fact PNG images, not ICO icons - hence maybe your differing results. For this reason you may be better off trying something special like RealWorld Icon Editor which fully supports PNG icons:

http://www.rw-designer.com/3D_icon_editor.php

The software author is a member here at DC.

PhilB66:
http://www.vlsoftware.net/icons-from-file/

Edvard:
If you've got access to a Linux box, try the icoutils:
http://www.nongnu.org/icoutils/

I've used them very successfully extracting png's from Windows icons.
Perhaps this weekend I'll try compiling on Cygwin to make Windows binaries for icotool:
The icotool program converts icon and cursor files into a set of PNG images. (Each icon/cursor file may contain multiple images, usually of different sizes and with different number of colors.) Icotool can also create icon/cursor files from PNG images.
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Sound like what you need?

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