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.

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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

I had the same problem and I got it to work by following instructions from a forum. What I did was this (copied):

I find solution :) Wrapping with "" all tortoise keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

on 1TortoiseNormal and etc... I understood the problem, seeing as Dropbox and it worked regedit there was the sign ("") to Dropbox but not tortoise. So I added the signs, close explorer.exe and hop it was good :)

So what I did was rename the key 1TortoiseNormal to "1TortoiseNormal" etc. I have no idea why wrapping it inside a double quote makes it work again. Note that a restart of Windows Explorer is required for the changes to take effect.

The original forum is gone, but a good summary is supplied in the comments.