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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T20:30:17+00:00

I’ve been working with a program someone else has made and I wanted to

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I’ve been working with a program someone else has made and I wanted to change the icon.

The icon I have is 256×256. I used http://converticon.com/ to create the icon (from a bmp I think). I used the icon in Inno Setup to create an installer and it worked fine

So I go to Options -> Application and attempt to load it. However, Delphi 2007 gives me an error ‘The parameter is incorrect.’ with this info: https://i.stack.imgur.com/vRCgs.png

When I do the same thing in Delphi XE, it works and loads the icon and changes it on compile. I can’t use XE right now because the program uses a math parser that has a problem with unicode (thats something to fix for later haha)

So, what I did was open the project in XE, change the icon, save it, delete the dproj and open it in 2007. This works, compiles and displays the correct icon, but when I go to the project options, it gives me the same ‘The parameter is incorrect’ error.

The workaround isn’t a big deal, but I shouldn’t need to do it. Does anyone know why I can’t change the icon in Delphi 2007?

Edit: I just used that same converticon site to convert the 256×256 icon to 192×192 and smaller and now it works perfectly. Thanks for the answers

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The "icon" file is actually a collection of images, at different resolution and using different encodings. When I’m creating my icons I’m making sure they don’t actually contain the 256×256 PNG-encoded version because development tools built before Windows Vista don’t understand that. And that includes your Delphi 2007 and my Delphi 7. I also remove the alpha-encoded 256×256 icon because it simply makes the file needlessly large.

    You’ve got two fixes possible:

    • Find an ICO editor and remove all of the larger formats until your Delphi accepts the icon. I personally never seen the 256×256 used in the real world, they’d take up huge amounts of space on user’s Desktop or in Windows Explorer.
    • Use a dummy icon and replace the icon resource in the generated exe after Delphi is done with it. This way you can keep all of the larger image formats, including the 256×256 PNG image.

    Edit to correct an error

    If possible, always include the 256×256 image, Windows scales that down for everything above 64×64.

    I always assumed Windows Explorer would show an image that’s based on the closest matching image size available in the ICO. That is, if a 128×128 image is necessary, Windows would use the 128×128 image if available, or scale down the 256×256 image if that’s available, or scale up the 96×96 image. Apparently that’s not so. I’ve just made a test icon consisting of several image formats, including 32, 48, 72, 96, 128 and 256 consisting of simple blobs of color (using the flood-fill tool). In Windows Explorer I cycled throw the various Display Modes, and it became apparent that starting with "Large Icon" (and that’s not very large) Windows will scale down the 256×256 icon, and if that’s not available, use the 48×48 icon, unscaled! The result is truly ugly and unexpected. The 72×72, 96×96 and 128×128 icons were simply ignored.

    Thank you David for pointing this out.

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