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loosing registry

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by 2000man

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I am running windows 98se and from timew to time it says it encounters a problem with the registry and will restore a recent backup. After it reboots it restores a backup from when windows was first installed and I cannot run any of my programs. I have to reinstall them to make them work and some won't reinstall at all. I sarted making a backup of the registry and saving it to my desktop so this wouldn't happen again but when I reinstalled the saved backup it didn't help. Any ideas?

3 replies

by thechas

Start with a virus scan.

Next, boot into safe mode, and run scandisk in thorough mode to verify that you have no Hard drive problems.

How much RAM do you have?
While not the 'common' problem, I can envision how Windows could corrupt the registry if you have more than 511MB of RAM.
There is a bug in the W9X code that can cause various system problems if you have over 511MB of RAM. This bug is VERY configuration dependant.
It is also possible that you have a RAM module that is going bad.

As to backups, I assume that you are backing up both user.dat and system.dat
Restoreing the files from your backups SHOULD bring everything back to 'normal'.

You can also use ScanReg.

There is a full chapter devoted to rgistry issues in the book "Windows 98 Annoyances"
Links to the book are at www.annoyances.org

Chas

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