Andrew

Every now and then the TortoiseSVN overlay icons turn in to random garbage, and worse still, remain that way until I reboot:

Now, I thought I had been to the TortoiseSVN site before to see if there was any information on this and came up empty, so I've just been putting up with it for a while. A few days ago I got re-fed up with the situation and went out searching and much to my pleasure (and somewhat embarrassment) found that it is covered in the TortoiseSVN FAQ.

Why do the overlay icons sometimes change to random graphics:

The Windows icon cache is a fairly buggy creature. You can solve this in one of the following ways:

• Install Microsoft's TweakUI and run the option to rebuild icons.
• Or increase the icon cache size. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer and add a new String Value called Max Cached Icons. The default value is 500 - try increasing it to 2048 (see Q132668 in the Microsoft knowledge base for more details).
• Or delete the file called ShellIconCache in your Windows directory. And reboot.
• With TortoiseSVN 1.3.0 and later, you can also rebuild the icon cache by calling TortoiseProc from the command line like this TortoiseProc.exe /command:rebuildiconcache

Everything is back to normal, and no reboots required: