Friday, December 4, 2009

TortoiseSVN overlay icons broken after JungleDisk 3 installed

I run TortoiseSVN as a source control tool on my desktop. As is usually, files and directories under source control have various icon overlays to indicate their control status.

After installing JungleDisk 3.0, I noticed that these TortoiseSVN overlay icons no longer worked. Following a bit of research it turns out that something else was interfering with the overlay icon settings in Windows. In this day and age, Windows apparently still has some hardcoded internal limits on this sort of thing. Geez.

In Windows, you can have at most 11 defined overlay icons. Due to the nature of source control, tools like Tortoise legitimately use up a lot of these slots. However, JungleDisk as of version 3.0 includes a feature called "Synch" which is some sort file backup scheme.

Unfortunately, JungleDisk forces installation of its own overlay icons for the Synch feature. Not only that, it rudely injects them with reference names intending to keep them at the top of the Windows list. So if that install makes the total overlay count exceed 11, the JungleDIsk install breaks the behaviour of other tools already running fine on your system -- without even asking you.

To fix this, use the registry editor to open:

 HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
And remove the keys installed by JungleDisk; they are the ones that start with "1Sync", "2Sync" and "3Sync". After removing them, you will need to reboot for the change to take effect.

I have sent a note to the JungleDisk people asking them to fix their installer.

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