"TopicProvider.cs," the developer shouted, indicating someone in the room had committed an updated project file, but not the new file.  Humbled, I quickly went to my sandbox and added and committed the file.

"TopicProviderTests.cs," came another shout.  Again quickly I added the file.

Feeling embarrassed that I missed committing two files, I noticed that I had no icon overlays on my files, indicating my status with the CVS repository.  No matter what I did I couldn't get the overlays to come back, and boy I was missing them.  You don't realize how often you use the visual cues they provide until they're gone!

I tried:

• Rebuilding overlay icons in TortoiseCVS Preferences
• Rebuilding icons with TweakUI (one of Microsoft's Power Toys)
• Reinstalling TortoiseCVS

None of the above worked.  The only thing I could think of was that I had recently installed Office 2007, which installed a folder synching program called "Groove".  I thought maybe Groove worked similarly to CVS and provided some icon overlay to notify you of a change.

Some digging provided the following provided the following from the TortoiseCVS Page:

The number of overlays allowed by Windows is limited to 15 in total. Windows itself uses 4 of those, leaving the remaining 11 to be used by other applications. If you have other software installed that uses icon overlays, the limit may be exceeded, causing some overlays not to be shown.

To resolve this problem, either uninstall the other software altogether, or manually remove one of the other icon overlay handlers. This can be done by editing the registry. Use at your own risk! You can delete [unused] entries at HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers.

A quick check of the registry key above showed the following:

Notice the number of Groove icons.  Windows sorts the registry based on Alpha, and this must've been found somewhere else, because if you look, TortoiseSVN stores it's overlays by preceeding the name with an integer.  Very smart!!

My TortoiseCVS overlays disappeared when I had installed Groove due to the limitation that Windows has on overlays.  I uninstalled Groove and there appeared my TortoiseCVS overlays.  Here's my registry after:

Completely evolutionary thinking that prompted someone in the SVN camp to notice this problem and figure they should make themselves first in the registry all the time and therefore never have users experience what I did.