[Catalyst] How do you make your favicon file?

[John M. Dlugosz]

I was surprised to see that IE9 still won't take anything but an ICO file for the 
"favicon".  In fact, it will ignore the LINK in the header and use a favicon.ico file in 
the root if present.

So, what tool do you use to create this file, say, by converting a PNG?
Thumbs Plus threw away the alpha channel completely, and the icon resource editor in 
Visual Studio 10 is still from the 80's, giving only a single transparent bit for 
256-color and higher; yet I read that starting with Windows XP they ditched the AND/OR bit 
layer and went with a full alpha transparency layer.

So, given a PNG file, is there a tool that will spit out a ICO that works as well as can 
be expected, aimed at XP compatibility but with an older compatibility image in there 
(Windows 2000) as well?

This is something every web site needs.  So where do you get yours?

--John