Unfortunately I have to work on a Windows machine at work, which leads to all kinds of unecessary problems, today’s being that the icon overlays for my files using TortoiseSVN have disappeared.
After putting up with the missing icon’s for a week, I discovered the reason for their disappearance was due to me installing Dropbox on my machine.
Unfortunately Windows limits the number overlay icons permitted, with the number differing depending on your version (between 11 and 15), and installing a programme which adds more icons can knock out some of your earlier installed icons.
Windows reserves 4 of the overlay slots for it’s own overlays, and TortoiseSVN has 9, so the 4 overlays added when I installed Dropbox had cancelled out my SVN overlays.
In order to fix this you need to manually change the order of the overlays. First open the Windows Registry Editor (Run regedit.exe), and navigate to the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
Here you will see a collection of overlay folders (Tortoise, Dropbox etc) andyou can delete unwanted overlays, I removed Tortoise Locked, Read Only and Unversioned as I do not use these, as well as the Windows Offline Files and Sharing Private. I then added a prefix, _z, to the Dropbox overlays, in order to push them to the bottom of the list.
Now when you reboot Windows the Tortoise icons are back.