"I wish I could mark one of the answers as ""accepted"" but reality proved to be even stranger.
Shortly after I asked this question, my laptop was stolen. Consequently, in the interest of increasing my acceptance rate, my 'official accepted answer' is:
"Check this page out: ""Shell folders are displayed with the standard folder icon in Windows Vista"" - it sounds like what you're running into. Blurb from page:
Symptom: When you open Windows Explorer, the shell folders such as Documents and Pictures may be displayed with a standard folder icon rather than the special folder icons. Resolution: This behavior can occur when the desktop.ini file in the shell folder is missing or incorrect, or it has no attributes set. The default contents of the desktop.ini file for various shell folders in Windows Vista are given below. In each shell folder that's missing the special icon, create a file named desktop.ini and paste the content corresponding to the shell folder.
It then goes on to give you code for the Shell folders' specific desktop.ini settings. Documents [.ShellClassInfo] LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21770 IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-112 IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll IconIndex=-235
