TortoiseGit not showing icon overlays

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.

I had the same problem and I got it to work by following instructions from a forum. What I did was this (copied):

I find solution :) Wrapping with "" all tortoise keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

on 1TortoiseNormal and etc... I understood the problem, seeing as Dropbox and it worked regedit there was the sign ("") to Dropbox but not tortoise. So I added the signs, close explorer.exe and hop it was good :)

So what I did was rename the key 1TortoiseNormal to "1TortoiseNormal" etc. I have no idea why wrapping it inside a double quote makes it work again. Note that a restart of Windows Explorer is required for the changes to take effect.

The original forum is gone, but a good summary is supplied in the comments.