Are the icons moddable? There seems to be some moddability in Graviteam's games, so there might be a way to switch back to the old icons.
I am tempted to just buy the Russian release for Operation Star. The wait for an English release is proving to be a little longer than expected, and I am eager to play Graviteam's fantastic (some say better than sex, even) games.
Don't wait, I don't speak russian and manage to play without problems. New gui from the patch is great, and in the last days there was released another patch and a free mikroaddon (just use google translator on
http://www.graviteam.com/news-archive.html)
And I really hope that the icons are moddable - the problem may be, that there are more kinds of army in operation star, so we cannot probably just copy/paste icons from Kharkov (?)