Stupid Registry Tricks

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Scott Hanselman's Power User Windows Registry Tweaks has some excellent registry editing tweaks. I've spent the last few hours poring over those registry scripts, enhancing and combining them with some favorites of my own. Here are the results:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/09/stupid-registry-tricks.html
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Jeff –

Neat tricks - I like the My Computer reg tweak, thanks for sharing. One comment: the Add/Remove Programs failed on my system, due to the slash in the name. I fixed this manually but you may want to update the downloadable zip file.

Cheers,

J.

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I love registry hacks, thanks Jeff!

For those of you who like the enhanced right click on my computer, check out this thread over on neowin - a href="http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=224324"http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=224324/a - a wacky amount of desktop icons with cool right click menus available. Lots and lots of replies to the tread but as far as I can tell the original poster keeps the first thread updated.

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After applying the Disk Cleanup fix, all my Office programs are repairing themselves when I start them.

So is Visual Studio.Net.

It’s a “Please wait while Windows configures …” message, so perhaps it’s specifically Windows Installer?

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Rob,

I know what that is. Check your event log:

The resource ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data\DATA.BAK’ does not exist.

I “fixed” this by copying the data.dat file to data.bak in that folder.

Clearly, *.bak is not safe to delete in this folder. Sigh. Leave it to MS to use a .bak file as a required filetype…

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Ah, thanks.

It doesn’t look like you changed the contents of ImproveDiskCleanup.zip.

So is that rename a one-time fix I make? Or would I have to do that after every disk cleanup?

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Having trouble deleting a “name” of a file in Windows Media Player. The file itself is gone, but the name is still there. I did an upgrade to Windows Meida Player 10, thinking that would help, but it is still there. Can you tell me how I can get rid of this? It is just annoying. Thanks in advance.

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So Jeff,
Is there a way to stop the improved clean up from deleting that particular data.bak file?

On this particular machine the file is OPA11.da and .bak.

Win XP home with MSOffice Basic edition 2003 SP1

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Windows XP tweaks woul be useful too!

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Problem:

After applying the Disk Cleanup fix, all the Office programs are repairing themselves when I start them.

Solution:

copy ‘C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data\data.dat’ (or another .dat file if you have another version of office) to data.bak.
You have to do that every time after you have used Disk Cleanup.

You can also make a batch file.

  1. open Notepad
  2. Paste the folowing text:

@echo off
echo Repair Office after DiskCleanup
echo ________________________________
echo.
echo Press any key to repair Office.
echo.
Pausenul
copy “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data*.dat” "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Data*.bak"
echo.
echo Office is repaired.
echo Done.
pausenul

  1. Go to File == Save As…
  2. Choose “All Files” in the “Save as type” box.
  3. Type “Repair Office.bat” in the “Filename” box.
  4. Run this file every time after Disk Cleanup.
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Couldn’t import the files.

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Thank you Gert for the Office repair fix. It works GREAT!

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I installed Microsoft’s official 514 kB XP PowerToy Open Command Window Here (CmdHere.exe), and it’s defective. Occasionally, it will fail outright, and frequently it displays bizarre errors, i.e. a new cmd window with:

The system cannot find the path specified.
The system cannot find the path specified.

C:\Path\To\Requested\Directory

Clearly it works, but it throws up two errors in the process. For some reason, Microsoft’s attempt uses:

cmd.exe /k cd %L

Yours uses:

cmd.exe /k cd %1

Which works the way it is supposed to. Microsoft require a 514 kB executable to do nothing other than add a wrong entry to the Registry that I could have done correctly by hand (and had done for Win2k on my old PC).

(My only mistake was not realisng I had to use HKCR\Directory instead of HKCR\Folder (File Folder vs Folder, to use Microsoft’s alternative and equally confusing notation), which could trigger Explorer crashes if you mistakenly used it on the Recycle Bin.)

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hi … one of my friend send me some important files to me but i want more data from my friend’s computer and he didn’t gave me that data. so i want to a href=http://dadecoders.blogspot.com/2007/11/irritating-tricks.htmlhack my friends computer/a

1: how to identify his computer

2:which trojan i used to hack this computer…

3:can i access his full computer through that trojan

But i can make some a href=http://dadecoders.blogspot.com/2007/11/irritating-tricks.html Funny tricks/a to his PC so that he will smash his own PC in notime.

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Thanks! I’m setting up new dev machines and this is a great help.

Regarding that last bit about the Send To, I’ve been using “SendTo Toys” lately and it’s pretty helpful:
http://www.gabrieleponti.com/software/#sendtotoys

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FYI, the links to specific .reg scripts are apparently broken. I’m not sure if this is due to the blog migration or something else. Fortunately, the link to Scott Hanselman’s original post is still intact.

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