Stumped!! Registry permissions

[BD]

Short version:

aquired a trojan that I could not get rid of so ran recovery (XP) and
started over. Shortly after recovery completion, during the process of
removing all that stuff I never used, again, the ability to change my home
page in IE disappeared. Permanently in place there is a URL that no longer
exists (receive the 404 page) ----> http:// us3 dot hpwis dot com
slash. Since it's no longer there i can't figure out where it came from.
More inportantly tho I cannot change the registry value.

Figured I'd outsmart it... yeah well... thought I could load IE7 beta -
kind of force the clearing of the value. Install bombed BECAUSE the
installer could not change the value in the key. Manually tried to reset
the permissions on the keys affected - will not allow me to change them.

I am the effing administrator. It's not a big thing, just a little
inconvenience, it's the principle.

Any suggestions?

TIA, an old Curmudgeon

BTW, the system was originally purchased in 2001 so when I recovered, I
spent a long time watching the windows auto update run thru the list of
updates since 2001 - including SP2.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ for Bart's PE. By using this, you can create a bootable "mini" version of Windows. You can run REGEDIT from there. Using the Load Hive feature, you can load your user's portion of the Registry and delete the key/value. This effectively bypasses the permissions issue.