ToddGee.commie

I liked this guy's answer a lot -- doesn't mess around w/ command line stuff and allows the creation of transparent favicons.

From: http://www.techanswerguy.com/2007/03/creating-transparent-faviconico-wit...

creating a transparent favicon.ico with Gimp
I'm always forgetting the steps to do this properly. Here you go:
1) open a favorite image that you'd like to turn into a favicon to appear in your browser's location bar
2) click Image->Mode->RGB
3) using the erase tool, erase any areas of the graphic that you'd like to be transparent

cool site using rewrite rules in an .htaccess file http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php mod_rewrite on apache http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html