A month ago, I copied all the files from a repaired HD onto a new, blank HD for a laptop running Windows Vista. After repairing the boot sector on the new drive, I was able to boot into Vista just fine. The puzzling thing was that none of the programs installed by the Windows Installer had an icon! This was because my file copy program had skipped C:\Windows\Installer.
For more reading, about icon issues, see these links:
