Software developers regularly complain about Dropbox obliterating their TortoiseCVS/SVN/Git shell icon overlays in Window Explorer. This happens because Windows only supports 15 shell icon overlays. They even play a dirty trick to make sure their icons load first, by inserting spaces before their key names in the Windows Registry. Tortoise engages in the same behavior, battling to be loaded before the 15-item cutoff is reached. You can see the key names with this command:
reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
The key names look something like this:
ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ DropboxExt01 ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ DropboxExt02 ... ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ DropboxExt10 ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ Tortoise1Normal ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ Tortoise2Modified ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers\ Tortoise3Conflict ...
Personally, I have no use whatsoever for Dropbox’s shell icons, while I depend on those of TortoiseSVN, so let’s delete all the Dropbox entries. This batch file will delete all of the DropboxExtXx keys under ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers, then restart File Explorer so that the changes take effect:
@echo off
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('reg QUERY HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers ^| findstr DropboxExt') do (
reg DELETE "%%i" /f
)
taskkill /F /IM "explorer.exe"
explorer.exe
NOTE: This script must be run as Administrator in order to work.
