It took me a while to find it, so decided to post this.

Below is a list of known problems on Windows Vista.

• special columns don't show.

  The Windows explorer in Vista has changed quite a bit, and one of those changes was to abandon the additional columns but introduce a new "property system". Since the property system is file type based, we can't add a column for Subversion information anymore

• The context menu may look wrong. That's because TortoiseSVN uses ownerdrawn menus. Since Vista changed the appearance of the context menu, it switches back to the 'old' look as soon as it detects an extension which uses ownerdrawn menus.

  This has been fixed on the TortoiseSVN trunk. You can use a nightly build if you like. Or, as a workaround, enable the checkbox "Enable accelerators on the top level menu" in the Look and Feel page in the settings dialog.

• Exporting from a working copy only copies some empty folders.

  This bug is due to a change in the SHFileOperation API. Since the API doesn't work the same anymore on Vista as it did on Win2k or XP, we've already used another way for exporting. If you're affected by this, you can try a nightly build.

• UI rendering

  There are some problems when resizing the dialogs. After resizing, black areas and artifacts of borders and other controls can still show over other controls. Minimizing and restoring the dialogs will get rid of those and the dialogs will show correctly again.

  This has been fixed on trunk, you can use a nightly build if you like.

• Version 1.4.2 has some problems with the explorer. Use version 1.4.3 which has this fixed.

• very slow repository access.

  If every access to the repository is very slow and sometimes even times out, even though everything is working ok from an XP machine, then you most likely hit a special problem in Vista with the TCP-Autotuning feature. To get rid of these problems, open a command prompt and type netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled. You can read more about these problems here.