Using a 64-bit version of Windows 7, I noticed that some of my programs did not display the TortoiseSVN icon overlays and lacked the SVN context menus. A bit of sleuthing revealed the (somewhat) obvious: 32-bit application require the 32-bit version of TortoiseSVN to display to integrate with TortoiseSVN.
According to the TortoiseSVN website, one can safely install both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions side-by-side. The 64-bit version will provide the necessary services to 64-bit applications (including Windows itself), and the 32-bit version will service the 32-bit application.
So, I installed the 32-bit version too. To my dismay though, the TortoiseSVN icon overlays completely disappeared. The shell integration functions (SVN Update, SVN Commit, etc.) were all there and working fine, but the icon overlays were simply missing.
Googling around confirmed that others have been experiencing problems with missing icon overlays too. There were many suggestions, generally dealing with uninstalling and rebooting, changing the status cache settings, and even deleting the icon cache itself. Nothing worked for me.
Several (too many to count) uninstall, reboot, install, and reboot sessions followed with little success. At one stage I got the icon overlays to display on the left tree panel in Windows Explorer, but on the right-side content window they remained gone. Weird.
In the end, I solved the problem uninstalling TortoiseSVN (both versions), rebooting, and then deleting all Windows Registry that made reference to “tortoise”. Reinstalling and two reboots later, all was working like a charm 
I cannot remember when last I rebooting my computer this many times…
Keywords: TortoiseSVN, icon overlays, Windows 7 64-bit, shell integration
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
Thanks for your post – I am suffering from the same problem.
Could I ask what you reinstalled, and in which order?
@David, from the number of results that came up in Google, it seems clear that this problem is quite common. It does seem like other factors often plays a role too, e.g. other software that creates icon overlays.
In my case, I proceeded with installing the 64-bit version of TortoiseSVN first. Once I established that it was working properly (icons in context menus in Windows Explorer, a 64-bit application), I went on to install the 32-bit version too. I am happy to report that all is still working fine.
@eduard_k, feel free to quote my post. After all, the purpose of my blog is to document issues so that it may help others in the same situation
No Twitter for me at this stage; maybe later…
There is nothing mysterious about this problem:
Above is from webpage Fixing Icon Overlays for Dropbox + TortoiseSVN, the reason it worked for you is that Windows almost randomly chooses the 15 that works, so next time you installed the programs the new overlay icons were newer… Although you can tamper the lottery numbers by removing unnecessary overlay icons in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers, see the above webpage for more details. I had to delete substantial amount of overlay icons, and they become effective instantly as long as I restarted the explorer.exe from Task Manager.@Ciantic Thanks for your insightful comments.
This is a awesome piece of writing, im happy I uncovered it. Ill be back down the track to check out other posts that you have on your blog.
Thank you for sharing this. Well done and very informative.