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 f

Answer 1

Windows will only allow up to 11 icon overlay identifiers, arranged in alphanumeric order - if there are more than 11, these icons will not be displayed.

You can run the following command in a DOS prompt:

regedit /e c:\icons.txt HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

Then open the file C:\icons.txt. Skip the first two lines, and if 1TortoiseNormal and the other *Tortoise* values are not in the top 11 values, their icon overlays will not be shown. The solution provided by @Chi Chan is just a simple way to make 1TortoiseNormal rank higher when ordered among all the overlays, you can also rename the values by adding space(s) before 1TortoiseNormal, i.e.,

" 1TortoiseNormal"

to make them rank higher.

update: for Windows 8, the limit of icon overlays is 15.