When you fire up Nextstart it changes all the task bar icons, is there any way to load Nextstart but keep the icons that are already in the task bar without adding all of the ones that nextstart puts in the task bar. nextSTART adds a whole heap of icons most of which are blank, but still showing names once highlighted. any help is appreciated.

Can you post a screenshot, please?

here are to screenshots one is windows task bar the other is what happens when nextSTART's task bar is running, I would like to get nextSTART to look like the Windows one if possible.

That is a bug with Stardock's Iconpackager.

Check the solution to this problem in the Winstep FAQ HERE (Icons display the default (blank page) image.)

thanks for that, wrote it down so that I don't forget how to fix the problem should it arise again, will have to get onto Stardock and see if they can fix the bug.