How do I disable Tortoise BZR?

Question

I'm a huge fan of bzr and I'm glad they're working on tortoise for it, but currently it's WAY too slow to be useful. The icons are almost always incorrect and when I load a directory in explorer with a lot of branches it locks up my entire system for anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. I look forward to trying it again in the future, but for now I'd like to disable it.

Unfortunately I don't see it in add/remove programs and I can't find a way to disable it in the bazaar config directory. When I right click the icon in the task panel (by the clock) and choose "Exit Program" it just restarts moments later. I don't see it in the Services panel either. Is there any way to disable it?

I'm running Windows XP on the system in question.

Answer 1

According to the TortoiseBZR readme, you can disable it by running

python tortoise-bzr.py --unregister

from the install folder. Not sure where it's installed by default, but it looks like that might be in your Python site-packages folder.

Answer 2

Jason's answer seemed valid, so I spent some time looking for the py file. It's nowhere to be found. It seems when installing bzr via the setup it also installs tbzr binaries. I've looked through as many panels as I can find. Process Explorer (sysinternals), AutoRuns (sysinternals), Some Shell Extension browser, etc. I couldn't find a formal entry anywhere.

I found the registry entries, but I've no idea where they came from or how to "formally" get rid of them. I'm not in the mood to just start killing off registry entries as I actually have to get work done this week.

I'm just going to run the uninstall and then install the latest version (with TBZR unchecked). As far as I can tell that's the only way to resolve this.

Answer 3

I hear you Enobrev.

It's quite annoying that it cannot easily be removed. I too will just uninstall, then reinstall BZR.

On another note, "BZR" is a terrible key sequence to have to type for every command. I'll be sure to rename the "BZR.EXE" something more finger-friendly because my pinky just can't handle that "z" key all time.

Answer 4

I went to the install directory "C:\Program Files\Bazaar" and ran unins000.exe and got a nice deinstaller.

Answer 5

I think you can do:

regsvr32 /u tbzrshellext_x86.dll

I also killed tbzrcachew.exe in memory, but since, like enobrev, I couldn't find it with AutoRuns, I will suppose it is the shell extension that runs this cache.

Will know for sure when I will reboot my computer...

I agree that currently these icons are slow, doesn't update in real time, and options in context menu are often limited. I hope all these points will improve in the future.

[EDIT] It works! No need to kill the cache too.

Answer 6

You can disable icon overlays (main thing that makes it slow) via context menu: right-click on the bzr icon in the tray, settings, uncheck all drives.

Answer 7

You can use the utility "Autoruns" by SysInternals (now part of Microsoft) to disable Windows Explorer extensions (such as extensions which add themselves as right-click menu items).

This can come in handy when you can't find the 'proper' way to do it in an app or the app doesn't offer one.