Short answers first: (1) The installer's Repair option re-registers the shell extension and rebuilds machine-level keys; it normally leaves your per-user settings under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\TortoiseGit intact, but you should export that key first as insurance. (2) There is usually nothing you must clean manually — repair handles re-registration — but leftovers from a partially removed older version (different install path or orphaned shell-extension entries) are worth checking if repair alone doesn't fix it. (3) The reliable sequence is: back up your HKCU settings, run Repair elevated, restart explorer.exe, then verify.
Likely explanation vs. confirmed facts
Confirmed: TortoiseGit's context menu is a Windows shell extension that Explorer loads on demand. If its registration is missing or points to a DLL that no longer exists at the registered path (common when an upgrade is interrupted mid-file-replacement), the menu entries silently vanish while the application itself still runs. Explorer caches loaded extensions, so no fix is visible until explorer.exe restarts.
Likely, but not certain for your machine: a failed upgrade left the extension DLL registered at an old path or only partially registered. This is the most common cause, but I can't verify your registry state from here — the checks below will confirm it.
Step-by-step recovery
- Back up your per-user settings. In an elevated or normal command prompt:
reg export "HKCU\Software\TortoiseGit" %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\tortoisegit-hkcu-backup.reg
This preserves language, overlay, and dialog settings in the unlikely event the repair resets them. - Run Repair with elevation. Go to Settings → Apps → TortoiseGit → Modify (or rerun the original .msi), choose Repair, and approve the UAC prompt. Elevation matters: the shell extension registration lives under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and an unelevated repair can silently fail to rewrite those keys. - Restart Explorer. Either sign out and back in, or:
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe & start explorer.exe
- Verify. Right-click inside a Git working copy and confirm the TortoiseGit submenu appears. Also check a plain (non-Git) folder — the top-level "Git Clone" / "Git Create repository here" entries should show there.
If repair doesn't restore the menu
Then orphaned entries are the likely culprit. Do a full uninstall, reboot, then check for leftovers before reinstalling:
- Under
HKLM\Software\TortoiseGit and HKCU\Software\TortoiseGit — note the Directory value; it must match where you will reinstall. - The old install directory itself (e.g.,
C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit) — delete any remnant DLLs such as TortoiseGitStub*.dll after uninstall.
Then reinstall the current version, restart explorer.exe again, and re-verify. Your HKCU backup can be re-imported afterward if anything was lost.
Notes and uncertainty
Exact key names and CLSID values vary between TortoiseGit versions and between 32-bit/64-bit shells, so verify against your installed version rather than trusting any specific GUID from memory. If the menu is still missing after a clean reinstall and Explorer restart, the next diagnostic I'd want is the output of reg query "HKLM\Software\TortoiseGit" /s — that determines whether the problem is registration or something else (e.g., Explorer's shell-extension limit on icon overlays, which is a separate issue).
tortoisegit