It's a old easter egg. The dude is Tim Cain one of the Black Isle guys who worked on the game

Can I get it to go away? It's kinda creeping me out a little bit xD

No. Never.

Forever must you suffer the stare of Tim Cain. Worked on the game? Tim Cain is the creator of Fallout, not some lowly worker bee!

Noooooo~ D: Funny thing is that's been on my Desktop for months and I just noticed it like 20 minutes ago :P

As of this post you are now aware that an application icon is rarely a single image, but one different image for each size (and palette size; 16 colours, 125 colours, 24-bit, and 32-bit colour). Cain's face is the 48x48 icon (at 256 colours), while the others are vaultboy.

Thing is, back when the game was made, no one used 48px icons (the desktop icons were 32px). Now they're used by default.

Those eyes....it's like they are stripping me...

LOL, respect to the Cain.

So, I'm too lazy to try it. But on the shortcut properties (the very image you uploaded) click on "change icon" then go to your fallout folder and see if you see any vaultboy icons. If you don't, just select the fallout executable file and a list of icons should appear including the vaultboy. Alternatively you can download some google picture of your liking and link the "change icon" path to said downloaded picture (you'll need to save the downloaded image as a .png or .gif with MSPaint or something and make it 256x256 tops).

EDIT: Ok, I tried with some random shortcut and you must convert any images to .ico format. I'd just recommend browsing your FO, FO2, FO3, FNV folders for alternative icons, I'm sure you'll get something out of at least one of those games, be mindful to select "all files (*.*)" while browsing those folders and that some files (like executables) will display several icons to choose from once you have selected them, even when they just show once icon while browsing for them.

I you don't have a fallout.ico (or gfw_high.ico) file in your folder, then your only solution is to set your desktop properties to display small icons instead of large ones. That will force it to use the smaller Vault Boy icon instead.

If Tim doesn't float your boat, what about Lenny?

Brofist to the Cain.

Cain props

I did not know that Tim Cain is gay. I guess it isn't actually surprising. The best artists are usually gay.

No, it's just artists (1) are in the public eye and (2) can afford to come out, so it seems like a disproportionately large number of artists are gay.

just read rpg codex's post on him being gay. I lol'd very much XD