I accidentally removed the Explorer pinned down icon on task bar & when I launch Explorer to later be re-pinned to task bar to my surprise it's shown with ThinkVantage icon (the 3 red marbles). Right-clicking on that icon in the task bar shows "Recent" list up the top but at the bottom it says "Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools" above "Pin this program..." and "Close Window" context menu item.
How do I get the actual Explorer icon back with stock behavior? Thanks in advance

Try this:

Close all explorer windows and click on the icon in the taskbar with right mouse button while pressing the Shift key, then choose Properties. See if the icon is customized there.

Explorer icon file set on my machine is:
%windir%\explorer.exe
(icon in top-left corner is selected)

yak, thanks for the suggestion. I did that and the icon is indeed customized to point to ThinkVantage Tools, in addition to the target being set to "C:\Windows\explorer.exe ::{26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683}\2\::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}\Provider%5CMicrosoft.Base.DeviceDisplayObjects//DDO:%7B00000000-0000-0000-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF%7D\cat{8AA6B0C2-14A6-4da8-BF36-F7D93ACE9ACE}"
I attempted to change both icon & target to plain explorer but icon doesn't seem to change & when I launch explorer i still get the "ThinkVantage Tools" context menu. Is it possible somewhere deep in the registry that the behavior of Explorer is modified?

Have you tried rebooting after making the change?

yes, i have. and the pinned icon in task boar doesn't change - it keeps showing 3 red marbles.
right clicking on that icon still shows the "ThinkVantage Tools" and shift+right click -> properties confirms that all values point to C:\Windows\explorer.exe -- one thing i notice is that the properties window title says "Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools"

update: the 2nd time around i rebooted (by shutting it down, but i don't think it mattered) actually shows the correct Explorer icon now. however, the other mystery still remains: context menu of the task bar icon shows "Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools"
i guess i can live with that for now, i appreciate the help yak

Found an easy fix here:

http://www.howtowindows.com/how-to-wind ... n-missing/

The fix is to disable "Launch folder windows in a separate process.", under Folder Options -> View.

It's a bug I guess.

I found the solution.

1. Right click to the icon
2. From the rigth click menu, right click the "Windows Explorer" and click properties
3. Change the target to "%windir%\explorer.exe" (ThinkVantage append some parameters. If you delete them an change it to just %windir%\explorer.exe the icon will get back to its original.