oh, I thought it was just a dup of bug 82301, if it's a theme bug we should 
be able to fix it easily.

Garrett - we need a larger volume icon.

Nah, bug 82301 is about launchers. This one is fine if you change the theme.

the volume applet is using the stock icons:
#define VOLUME_STOCK_MUTE             "volume-mute"
#define VOLUME_STOCK_ZERO	      "volume-zero"
#define VOLUME_STOCK_MIN              "volume-min"
#define VOLUME_STOCK_MED              "volume-med"
#define VOLUME_STOCK_MAX              "volume-max"

data->zero = gtk_widget_render_icon (data->applet, VOLUME_STOCK_ZERO,
					     volume_icon_size, NULL);
data->min = gtk_widget_render_icon (data->applet, VOLUME_STOCK_MIN,
					     volume_icon_size, NULL);
data->med = gtk_widget_render_icon (data->applet, VOLUME_STOCK_MED,
					     volume_icon_size, NULL);
data->max = gtk_widget_render_icon (data->applet, VOLUME_STOCK_MAX,
					     volume_icon_size, NULL);
data->muted = gtk_widget_render_icon (data->applet, VOLUME_STOCK_MUTE,
					     volume_icon_size, NULL);

Okay, this is the third time I'm trying to post to this bug. Bugzilla keeps
eating the comments and giving me errors. (It seems to mostly work fine when I
comment on other bugs, however. Maybe it just doesn't like me today...)

Anyway,

We have three solutions here:

* Fix the volume applet so it doesn't scale the icons
* Make 48x48 versions that just enlarge the space around the 24x24 versions
* Adapt the 48x48 version of the icon for the stock icon theme

Of course, there's also:

* Use SVG for everything

(But that's not an option yet. *grin*)

I *don't* want a 48x48 applet for twiddling my volume!

Bug 83175 seems to be a duplicate of this
(I can't add a comment there)

There are now multiple sizes of the volume indicator in redhat-artwork. The
configuration or the actual code may need to be changed; but artwork is in place.

works in RHL 9 - think it was fixed for 8.0 too.