I’ve had a long standing fight with TortoiseSVN‘s TSVNCache.exe both in terms of disk I/O performance and it holding locks to files/folders I want to work with. Turns out that you can set which directories it watches with an include/exclude list under Settings->Icon Overlays.
Thanks to Travis Illig for the blog post on this issue: http://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/2007/09/26/optimize-tortoise-svn-cache-tsvncache.exe-disk-io.aspx
For what it’s worth, my patterns are:
Exclude: C:\*
Include:
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\*
C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\*
Note the trailing ‘\*’, which seemed necessary to get it working for me. I killed TSVNCache.exe after saving the preference changes and then went to some SVN working copy folders. I watched TSVNCache.exe briefly in procmon and it seems that it’s only accessing the specified directories now.