When it happens to you... Registery fail

LogicalDrm · July 13, 2014

I've been pretty careless when it comes to doing changes to registery. I've thought that software which I use to do that is secure enough for it. Well, they aren't. I've now learned it the hard way. This is what I've been doing for last 4h.

I was getting ready for testing temps with case mod (window). For this I only needed to find out which stress tests I had installed and which of them would stress both CPU and GPU at once. During this I decided to remove some software. I use almost only IObit's Uninstaller for this as it has proven better than Windows one. Most times, that is. The Uninstaller has option for clearing remaring files and folders. Really good thing when you don't want suspicious software to leave something lurking. But... It also cleans registery. I haven't have any problems before with this. And I still can't understand why this time was different.

I uninstalled software which was good but which I didn't need anymore. As always, I did scan for files. After that I opened HWinfo to check whether it had benchmarking ability built-in. At this point I was greeted with crasg by explorer.exe. Nothing special, really. But what followed was. I couldn't access desktop. Thinking this was really nothing special I booted system.

This is when things get bad. I couldn't log on to my account and error was "The Group Policy Client service failed the logon". First time ever I've got that so I first tried to reboot, then opened laptop and searched for solutions. First suggested fixing registery which did nothing. I think because some relevant file/value was removed and couldn't be restored. The other solutions were about creating new account and copying settings from old. I wasn't really into doing that since I've got junctions going on.

So I tried other ways. Startup fix, nothing. System restore, nothing. At this point I decided to give new account a try. By following guides I tried to copy all files to new account by using dummy account. Only to find new account having same error. This meant that something in settings files had to be corrupted as dummy worked fine. To point out, I could also login in Safe Mode with original account.

Only fix would be to create fresh account and setup junctions with it again. This had some problems, one being that for unknown reason the account became temp few times. I also had to go to Safe Mode just to move some files around. But everything seems to be working again. No files lost.

What did I learn? Be careful with registery. Unless you want to build new account from scratch.

Enderman · July 13, 2014

I always used CCleaner to clear my registry errors. idk of anyone having issues with ccleaner...

It does give you an option to back up your registry though, i never click that

Builder · July 13, 2014

-snip-

Aaaaand thats why ~/etc/ is better than the registry...

LogicalDrm · July 13, 2014

I always used CCleaner to clear my registry errors. idk of anyone having issues with ccleaner...

It does give you an option to back up your registry though, i never click that

I use it too. And will continue using. But now I will actually read what values are being changed/deleted. Most are harmless. Like removing unused file extensions.