Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Registry Zen

Even if you’re accustomed to using Windows, the Registry may sometimes seem like a New Orleans graveyard at midnight, full of strange shadows, half-glimpsed terrors, and legendary tales of misfortune. In this vein, I want to digress a little to talk about the philosophy behind the Registry, as well as the Zen of editing and using it.

First of all comes the obligatory scare tactic. Microsoft’s documentation contains many warnings about the dire consequences that can result from editing the Registry if you aren’t careful and knowledgeable. Instead of repeating these warnings, I’ll offer one of my own, but just once, so you won’t have to keep seeing it over and over.

Warning

The Registry is a key component of Windows 2000. If you remove a necessary key or change a key’s value to an out-of-range value, some programs repair the damage automatically, but others fail spectacularly. Microsoft’s Registry editors immediately make changes, so there’s no backing out if you make a mistake. Please don’t edit the Registry on your production machines until you’ve read Chapter 3, which explains how to recover from a damaged Registry.

You can think of the Registry like one of those self-service storage warehouses that have popped up across North America like sheet-metal mushrooms. If you’ve never seen one, let me briefly digress: these warehouses, which usually have catchy names such as “Public Storage” or “U-Store-It,” are fenced compounds filled with long, low metal buildings. These ...