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I ran into an very odd variant of an issue. I had a Windows program using shell overlay icons that were not appearing in windows explorer. What makes this odd is that they WERE showing in some "Save" and "Save As" dialog boxes (MS Office and Firefox), but weren't in others (Chrome). I had checked all the normal things, such as making sure the icons appeared first in the

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers

registry key. I looked at the WOW version as well. I even checked the DPI settings as suggested in this question: TortoiseSVN shell overlays only showing for medium and large icons in explorer

None of those worked, but I finally figured it out so I thought it would be nice to put up in case someone else is tearing their hair out over this. The system I ran into this on is Windows 10 and I haven't tested against older versions of Windows.

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Benji
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2 Answers2

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Eventually I decided to search my registry for any keys that had the same value as the icons that weren't showing up, while checking against a Windows 10 system that was working. Turns out that the values for all of the keys were showing up in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Blocked

When I removed values from there and restarted explorer the icons showed up. I have no idea how they ended up in that registry section in the first place, but that was it. Hope this helps someone else.

Benji
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If you happen to see such symptoms (shell overlays not showing up in some application), you use 64bit Windows and the answer above didn't help you, make sure that your app properly registers both shell extensions (one for 32bit and the second one for 64bit). If only 64bit dll is loaded, you won't see overlays in 32bit apps.

32bit shell overlays are registered in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
jbacic
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