I love the thought that you might have to create an icon in an emergency.

This sounds eerily familiar. I work on a small team which was owned by a British company (we are in Oz). We built a quick demo of our proposed new application in VB6, but quickly realised we would need something else for the full-blown thing (~200K lines), so we were working in C++. When our boss went on a long trip, the UK sent over a "project manager" who quickly decided that the re-write of some of the useful VB code was a waste of time and we should write it in VB.NET... He was with us for 3 months, managing a team of 5 and never worked out that we had ignored his directive completely. He was happy as long as he got his timesheets and project plans updated with (completely bogus) information. The product lives on (just putting it into VS2010) and we are owned by another company. Andy