another suggestion........
Linuxera was helping me not long ago with this very operation.... she also suggested that I go to /usr/share/icon and browse the icon folders there.... remove the .cache files from each one. Apparently if you change to another icon set, each one you use generates a .cache file..... one of mine was 53Mb!!! You may not have done anything like that, but it doesn't hurt to check....
I have since done a live cd and a dvd as well (since everything I want on my system won't fit on a cd....)
Have fun!!!!

Interesting Meemaw...thank you!
I have taken out several of the icon packages completely as they seem a little superfluous. And updating to the new gnome icons dumps a whopping 115 mb of nuove-xt-aero icons into the mix to make things worse, and I did notice that updating the Gnome icons also put an EXTRA .cache file, it saved the old one and re-named it, that was 53.5 mb right there. So I deleted the extra and dumped the nuove icons for a savings of over 200 mb.
It's my understanding, that the icon-cache is needed/helpful in a number of programs, so my question is, if deleted/moved-temporarily specifically for re-mastering purposes, will the re-master rebuild the cache when run as LiveCD and/or installed?