Hi Richard,

Thanks for your posting. From your description, you have some projects
which need to set a Application icon and the icon is in a central place( a
shared resource file or assembly) and you don't want to include the icon in
each separate project, yes?

As for this problem, I'm afraid this is a fixed behavior because the
Application Icon is the one which represent the application both at runtime
but also in the file system. When we view  the application's executable
file in the file explorer, we can see the Application Icon displayed. So
the application icon must be included in the application(project) itself.  
It's different from the Form's icon which can be set at runtime and can be
load from a external location.

Thanks.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support