Dans mon cas, I only have Dropbox and TortoiseSVN. Dropbox is really
becoming annoying - after every update, J'ai besoin de run a script I made
that deletes Dropbox's overlays from registry and then restarts
Explorateur Windows.
Remove any unused overlays from the following location:
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
Source: Why are Icon Overlays (from 3rdParty-Apps) not showing up in the Win8 Explorer?
Would increasing to 2535 cause a huge performance impact?
Since the current limit cannot be changed its not possible for us to predict what sort of performance impact there would be if the limit was increased.
Why hasn't Microsoft realized yet that this is a very popular issue
and tried to make a fix for this?
I would presume it effects less people then you think it does. Only somebody, from the Windows Shell team, would actually know this answer. Until Microsoft makes their decision decision known, we can only make educated guesses, which basically would be that nobody has increased the limit.
Why isn't there, au moins, an option that advanced users can change to
increase this limit?
Only somebody, from the Windows Shell team, would actually know this answer. Until Microsoft makes their decision decision known, we can only make educated guesses, which basically would be that nobody has written the code to allow us to increase the limit.
Raymond Chen, a Microsoft Developer, wrote about the Windows Shell's icon overlay feature in 2009:
Generally speaking, overlays are not a good way of presenting
information because there can be only one overlay per icon, and there
is a limit of 15 overlays per ImageList. If there are two or more
overlays which apply to an item, then one will win and the others will
lose, at which point the value of the overlay as a way of determining
what properties apply to an item diminishes since le seul moyen to be
sure that a property is missing is when you see no overlay at all. (If
you see some other overlay, you can't tell whether it's because your
property is missing or because that other overlay is showing instead
of yours.)
Mr. Chen also stated:
Another example of applications having a selfish view of performance
came from a company developing an icon overlay handler. The shell
treats overlay computation as a low-priority item, since it is more
important to get icons à l'écran so the user can start doing
whatever it is they wanted to be doing. The decorations can come
later. This company wanted to know if there was a way they could
improve their performance and get their overlay onto the screen even
before the icon shows up, demonstrating a phenomenally selfish
interpretation of "performance".
In a follow-up article posted almost a decade later in 2019, Raymond expands on the technical reasons for the 15 icon limit (emphasis ours):
The overlay image is one of the pieces of information used when drawing an image from an image list. The options are encoded in the fStyle parameter, and when the bits were divided up for various purposes, four bits were available to be used to specify the overlay image. (You get 15 overlay images instead of 16 because you lose one of the values afin de specify “no overlay.”)
Sources:
