Fixing Icon Overlays for Dropbox + TortoiseSVN

If you are using Windows 7 (x64), Dropbox and TortoiseSVN, then you might eventually encounter that half of your icon overlays went missing.

Microsoft Office 2010 could also break these icon overlays (details).

Since TortoiseSVN seems to be sharing same overlays with TortoiseCVS, TortoiseHG and TortoiseGit, these programs could experience same glitches.

TortoiseXXX - windows shell integration for a given version control system.

Dropbox - SaaS backup solution that works like version control, but performs all the sharing automatically in the background.

Loosing overlay icons hurts badly, since both Tortoise and Dropbox are extremely good in what they are doing.

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.

Solution

So we've got to reduce the number of overlays. Since there are no settings in Dropbox or TSVN to disable certain overlays, we'll have to do this manually.

Step1: Start the registry editor (regedit) and navigate to the:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
  Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

Step2: Backup the entire branch. JIC.

Step3: Delete overlays that are rarely used and not essential for everyday work. I personally deleted these:

• Offline Files
• TortoiseLocked
• TortoiseIgnored
• TortoiseUnversionsed

Step4: Reboot.

As the result, Tortoise icons finally show up. Behavior of the Dropbox is more erratic, but this is not critical.

Caveat

There could be better solutions to the problem.

However, I didn't investigate the case a lot, for the lack of time - just checked that there are no proper solutions in the google, fired up the regedit, deleted a few entries and found out that it works for me.

NB: Copy of DropboxPath utility for x64.

Comments

[kris]

Thanks, this helped me.

[dood]

Cool.

BTW instead of deleting unused entry, just prefix them with Z (windows reads them in alphabetical order).

Instead of rebooting, just kill explorer.exe and launch again from task manager.

[Jos Krause]

In my case since I had installed the 32-bit version of Tortoise the icon registry entried were not present in the 64-bit tree of the registry, therefor I exported the 32-bit registry key and modified the path inside the .reg file to match that of the 64-bit (ie. remove the wow6432node value from the tree) and imported it inside regedit.

For me personally this also fixed the overlay issue, since the 64bit client will not work on my current install of Windows 7, I cannot commit to the repository, whereas using the 32-bit version of the client works out of the box.

[Servi]

I had a long search to find this article. It fixed my problems. Many thanks!

[SonicE]

Hey, great solution. It work's for me too. Just renamed the registry entries with Z_ and restarted explorer.exe and now I have my icons again. Thank you very very much.

[Gabriel R B]

Solves my problem too... Very thanks

[Gabriel R B]

Thanks... Solves my problem...

[jared]

fixed it for me as well. Thanks!

[Ciantic]

Hi!

This does the trick... but I've been wondering, how on earth we can get this fixed? Where should we post our bug report about Windows itself... As ridiculous at that sounds, but their bug reporting systems are a mess.

[Rinat Abdullin]

@Ciantic,

http://connect.microsoft.com/