Registry deletions

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul W.
  • Start date Start date
Paul W. said:
I have an evironment where the care and feeding of workstations has been
sorely neglected for quite some time. As a result of this, workstation
registries have become bloated (well more bloated than normal). I'm not
in charge of managing the workstations but I am attempting to correct a
potential performance issue. I have no trouble creating GPOs or .reg file
pushes that add or modify the registry but in this case, we are migrating
from a Novell F&P environment where numerous legacy entries referencing
the old Novell environment exist in workstation registries. Rather than
try and map out each and every key (just a cursory investigation of a
single workstation has revealed at least 50 unique instances and I expect
a lot more), I was hoping to find the best way to find and delete these
left over entries. In most cases, these entries can just sit there but
unfortunately, in some cases it creates some performance issues as those
connections (such as printers) are attempted to be made and eventually
time out.

Maybe I'm missing something but the search results I get contain a ton of
information about how to add information to or modify (i.e change values)
for existing information but not how to perform deletions using keyword
information.

Apparently, this is not the place to actually get helpful and/or useful
suggestions.

I will continue to search elsewhere.
Click to expand...

Hi Paul,

Besides using a .reg file to add or modify the registry, they can also be
used to delete entries. I would suggest you sample more than one workstation
for ONLY the "unique instances" that would actually cause problems, and
export them and combine into a single .reg file, and edit them so a merge
would delete those keys, and provide the .reg files to those computers that
need the fix.

For instance, to delete these fictional keys--

[begin quote:]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKCU\Software\Novell\PrinterMessErUpper]
[-HKCU\Software\Novell\NetworkMessErUpper]
[:end quote]

(Note the leading hyphen [minus] sign.)

It is always good advice to backup the registry before any changes.

Hope This Helps.
--Richard
 
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