XP Pro/SP3 startup crash after cleaning with Windows Live registrycleaner

[voxhumana]

XP Pro SP3 has ran perfectly fine, until i used the Windows Live
scanner to clean my registry; after which, i would encounter
mysterious crashes after leaving my computer unattended (only
application running would be IE7 or Firefox)

I would like to use system restore to get back to an earlier point,
but alas, can't boot to run system restore!

I happened to have another hard disk drive with a bootable XP3 (its a
actually a backup hard disk from a very similar "more important"
computer in the house) and installed it as Drive C, my old unbootable
drive is now Drive D; i can see Drive D: and am running the error
checker on it etc.

Is there a way to run the System Restore utility on the "bad
drive" (Drive D and being able to restore it to an earlier time even
though I have booted from Drive C???

 

[voxhumana]

I have confirmed it is a corrupt registry by using F8 and disabling
auto-restart. Here is the code:
0x00000051 (0x00000003 0x00000001 0x00003000 0xE188A030)

 

[voxhumana]

PROBLEM SOLVED ... YAY
It was easy, once I researched and located the folder where System
Restore puts the backup copies of the the key registry files SAM
SOFTWARE HARDWARE DEFAULT.
I first made backup copies of them in C:\Windows\system32\config by
renaming the above with .bak extentions.
Then, I COPIED from C:\System Volume Information
\_restore{29FD9B63-4F58-4DB0-B2C4-8709D5244F27}\RP332 where RP232 was
the most recent restore point i wanted to restore from.
I booted the PC and picked SAFE mode, and started with the System
Restore program right away incase something was missed in my manual
copy; and picked the system restore date, in this case it was Sunday
6:01pm.
And all is good.
This would NOT work if you only had one drive i.e. only a C: drive
that you booted from because the registry files are lockedup when your
PC is running.
Maybe this thread will help someone else

This can be used to solve the dreaded "mup.sys" boot hang problem,
that was also fixed by resetting the registry.

OK, so why did i do all the above? The alternative likely would have
been to reformat and reinstall everything. What do I do next IMAGE
BACKUP MY ENTIRE HARD DISK!

 

[voxhumana]

Rereading this, its possibly a coincidence that my crashing happened
after running the reg cleaner, but I also delayed upgrading from IE6
as long as possible so there could have been another mixup resulting
therefrom. As we all know, its difficult to trackdown exactly what
caused the crashing. IF the crashing continues, I'll just go back to
another restore point, and re-iterate same until the crashing stops.
No worries, its just an internet computer, thankfully.

 

[John John (MVP)]

Registry cleaners are solutions for problems that don't exist, at best
they do absolutely nothing and at worse they create the kind of problem
that you have experienced. If you want to keep your Windows
installation in good working order don't use registry cleaners!

John