changing shell32.dll icons

Out of boredom I have started to sift through my windows installation trying to find files I can edit to make my computer as unique as possible. After manually changing quite a few icons, I found out about shell32.dll's purpose and have installed everything I need to edit it. (and have already made some changes) What I want to know, since I am wanting to change every icon in that dll, is do I need all the sizes and all the bitrates represented for each icon?

like some files that have 16 color, 256 color, and 16.8mil color variants of each icon in sizes of
16x16, 32x32, and other resolutions (honestly I don't mind making different resolutions for them)

Are all these variations required? I only ever use 32 bit graphics settings on my pc for normal use, and if I ever NEED to boot into safe mode for any reason, I don't really care how it looks, as I won't be staying there for longer than needed. I wouldn't think it would screw anything up, since they are just icons, but i want to make sure before I replace all of them.


Also, if I can remove some of the variants, what resolution icons would you recommend for best looks (since windows doesn't exactly scale images down very well on its own.)
I have seen in the resource hacker image sizes of:
16x16
24x24
32x32
48x48
and Icon packs that even go up to 128x128 and 256x256 (which i am guessing aren't natural for xp given the horrible compression pixelation i see.