TortoiseGit not showing icon overlays

Question

I have been using TortoiseGit for almost a full year now. It has been working very well for me until yesterday, when I encountered a problem. I was deleting a folder when Windows Explorer sort of crashed on me (it hung on "discovering items") for over an hour, then I restarted the system.

Since that time (and I am not sure if the incident described has anything to do with it), TortoiseGit has stopped showing icon overlays in explorer. The behaviour is, however, not like any of the others who posted questions here, because:

In the open file dialogue of all programs, the icons still exist (!).

Here is a list of things I tried:

1. I changed TortoiseGit settings to show different icons.
2. Reinstall TortoiseGit (uninstall, restart, install, restart).
3. I deleted all icon overlays starting with "Tortoise" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer \ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers, then uninstalled TortoiseGit, restarted the computer and reinstalled TortoiseGit.

---

Edit:

I tried to create a new user on my computer, and the new user has icon overlays working just fine. I am now even more confused.

Nothing helped so far. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, I suppose I missed the obvious step...

In TortoiseGit Settings > Icon Overlays:

Make sure to add your projects folder to the "Include Paths" box.

Answer 2

Before going nuts, just try rebooting! It worked for me ;)

Answer 3

Just add one Space(or more if needed) to first Name of Tortoise options to this regedit addersses:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

for example:

"1TortoiseNormal"

Should change to:

" 1TortoiseNormal"

after a system reboot icons shows currectly.

Answer 4

What is worked for me for Windows 10 is

1. uninstalling TortoiseGit
2. cleaning folders and register
3. installing it once again
4. rebooting the computer
5. making random commit even not seeing the red icon

Answer 5

I Agree with Chi Chan and I would like to add this as an complementary answer.

It's Dropbox Explorer icons. Here is a registry script to remove them. Save it somewhere, because they will come back!

Note, that the values change from time to time, too. Currently they have 3 spaces before the "DropboxExtXX", before they had only one.

Remove Dropbox Explorer Icons.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt01]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt02]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt03]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt04]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt05]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt06]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt07]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt08]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt09]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\   DropboxExt10]

Answer 6

I had installed TortoiseSVN (1.9.5) and msysgit (2.11.0) first on my Windows 10 64-bit machine. TortoiseSVN icons displayed fine.

When I installed TortoiseGit (2.3.0.0) after these two the icons wouldn't display.

I checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers and all looked fine. The tortoise icons were in the top 10.

What I used to fix was raised in TortoiseGit issue #692 on GitLab:

• Open regedit.exe
  • Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
  • Add a new string value "Max Cached Icons" with value "2000"

closed/restarted explorer and icons display!