Custom icons are not showing.

I have a new laptop which has win xp pro installed, all updates are applied. I created 2 custom shortcuts (to web addresses)with custom icons, the icons are located on the hard drive and the shortcut’s icon is pointed to the file on the hard drive. When the shortcuts were originally created the custom icons were there, now the custom icons are not there and no matter how many times I reset the icons, the path to the icons reverts to c:\window\system32\shell.dll
I can’t figure this out, have never had this issue before. I’ve tried recreating the shortcuts but the custom icons don’t show.