Until recently, the only knowledge I had of Groove was that it was some kind of collaboration product that we got as a result of bringing in Ray Ozzie. Then I got a new manager who insisted that our team standardize on Groove for the team document repository – so I got setup on Groove and went on with my life. In general, there’s nothing I found terribly impressive about it, but it wasn’t really getting in my way so no reason to get too upset…
Until my Tortoise SVN icon overlays stopped working.
I ended up spending quite a bit of time this morning trying to figure out exactly why they weren’t working. It was odd – I had no problems on my home machine – but on both of my work machines, same result – no TSVN icons. Finally, @pilotbob pointed me to this article which set off a chain of recollections – most notably that the major difference between my work machines and my home machine had to do with the order that I installed stuff. On my home machine, I installed Office after I got my dev environment setup. However, on my work machine, Office was installed as a part of the default OS install image – and Groove was included in that installation.
So why is this important? Because if you remember from the article, Windows supports only 15 overlay handler slots – and installing Groove puts 5 handlers right there on top of my TSVN handlers – the net result being that my TSVN icon overlays don’t load.
To fix, I simply went into the registry, deleted all of the Groove overlay handlers from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
Then rebooted. Voila! TSVN icon overlays come right back up!
