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VistaICO is a site that offers only a few icons, but the ones they do have are very high quality. The site looks a bit like an adsense site, the navigation is a bit weird, but you can find all the icons in the download section, and some cool wallpapers too.
They only offer 5 full packs, but these are full of great icons, all very well made and beautiful. They also have some specific icons like document icons, audio icons, script icons and so on. Wallpapers also only fill two pages but they capture the Vista-like feel very well.

Flickr hosts an unbelievable amount of images of all sizes on their website. One easy way to search Flickr for Wallpapers is to simply enter the term wallpaper in the search box on the Flickr homepage and browse through the results. Currently more than 260.000 images are found when searching for wallpapers.
While this manual method reveals lots of potential wallpapers it is on the other hand time consuming. Only four or five images are displayed before the user has to scroll to take a look at the other images on the page.

You all know that I like to search for new wallpaper repositories and one that I found recently is hosted at Flickr. What’s even more interesting is the fact that you can view all 25581 photos in a slideshow with the option to load a photo page if you spot a wallpaper that you like to download.
The Photo Pools name is Wallpapers (1024×768 minimum) which should give you a good understanding of what you can expect. The minimum size of every picture of the group is 1024×768 although photos with a size of 1600×1200 are preferred.

Desktopia is a desktop wallpaper manager for Windows and Macintosh that, unlike so many of its counterparts, is providing a limited amount of wallpapers instead of user selected ones. This approach does have some consequences. The good news is that the wallpapers provided by Desktopia are mostly well done, designer wallpapers so to speak. The benefit is obviously that the user does not have to flip through thousands of pages full of wallpapers to find the good ones among them.

I discovered John’s Background Switcher in the excellent Donation Coder forum where the user y0himba posted a review of it. John’s Background Switcher is a software that can easily switch background images, also known as wallpapers, in a set interval on the users computer. What makes this software special is that it not only provides access to local images but incorporates several online services as well.

DreamScene is an extra that ships with Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate that allows users to replace a standard wallpaper with an animated one. Microsoft is offering several videos for use in DreamScene but users can select a compatible video from their hard drive and make that their screensaver instead.

Studio Twenty Eight is the homepage of designer Javier Ocasio who is offering his services and also some of his visual styles, wallpapers and icons on that site. Each category contains a list of free downloads. You naturally can’t expect to find hundreds of different wallpapers, styles or icons on the website but you do find high quality downloads on that website. Some have been created in collaboration with other artists but most by Javier alone.

I reviewed the icon editor IcoFx about a month ago which offered the function to create an icon from an image that would be loaded into the software. It offered some benefits like different sizes and a configurable color range which made it one of the best tools for that purpose.

If you do not like to create your own icons with a program like IcoFX Icon Editor you can use the Icon Look search engine instead which provides an easy to use interface and search. The main interface consists of a search form and three links in the footer. The search results are quickly displayed after entering a search term and hitting enter or clicking on the Look button.