Comments on: The mystery of the disappearing TortoiseSVN icon overlays

By: ANDERSON

ANDERSON — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:27:59 +0000

Thank you for sharing this. Well done and very informative.

By: Obdulia Bournazian

Obdulia Bournazian — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:46:26 +0000

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.

By: Stefaans

Stefaans — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:06:06 +0000

@Ciantic Thanks for your insightful comments.

By: Ciantic

Ciantic — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:00:23 +0000

There is nothing mysterious about this problem:

There is only a limited number of overlay slots available in Windows. That's the byte order limitation (probably around 15, with 4 reserved by the OS). Whenever the limit is breached, we've got problems.

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.

By: Stefaans

Stefaans — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:27:43 +0000

@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…

By: Stefaans

Stefaans — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:24:32 +0000

@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.

By: David Bond

David Bond — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:45:17 +0000

Thanks for your post – I am suffering from the same problem.

Could I ask what you reinstalled, and in which order?

By: eduard_k

eduard_k — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:43:15 +0000

I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?