I've recently installed Windows 7 on a powerful desktop and a netbook. For the most, it's been an easy transition, but every so often I'll run into little quirks.

I use the excellent TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) to connect to SVN repositories, and one of my favorite features is the icon overlay in Windows Explorer so you can see at a glance the files which are under source control and their state. However, I was only seeing a couple of the possible icons. What could be wrong?

After some investigation, it turns out that Windows enforces a hard limit on the number of icon overlays it would register. It accepts the first 11 overlays and ignores the rest. Since I have other programs which use overlays as well, TortoiseSVN's overlays brought me to the limit and beyond.

So, how to fix this? Well, you have to decide which overlays you want to display, as you can't increase the limit. The overlays are in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

Windows will sort them in alphabetical order and choose the first 11, so you'll need to change the names of the registry keys for the overlays you don't want displayed (I usually add 'z_' to the front of the keys).

Here is the list of registry keys used by TortoiseSVN:

• TortoiseCVS0 - In cvs
• TortoiseCVS1 - Not in cvs
• TortoiseCVS3 - Conflicted
• TortoiseCVS4 - In cvs readonly
• TortoiseCVS5 - Ignored
• TortoiseCVS6 - Added
• TortoiseCVS7 - Deleted
• TortoiseCVS8 - Locked