If you know the Registry Editor's pitfalls, you can avoid them.
I’ve been away for a few days, so this will be an extra long posting, by way of penance! Some time back I commented that Microsoft’s Registry Editor was one of the worst-designed utilities ever, and it was truly amazing to me that the company has never dealt with its most serious shortcomings. In the spirit of backing up this comment, I thought I would point out those shortcomings here – which might be useful for anyone who is unfamiliar with the tool. First of all, you need to know that any changes you make in REGEDIT get made right away. There’s no “File > Save” command. So the very first thing that you must do before doing any modifications with REGEDIT is to either a) back up the entire Registry, which can be done for example by creating a “system state” backup with WBADMIN in Server 2008; or b) back up the key you are about to modify, which you can do within REGEDIT using an export operation. Second, there’s no “undo” command, so what I just wrote in the previous paragraph becomes doubly important. You must create a fallback position for yourself, because REGEDIT refuses to do so! Third, there is absolutely no guidance within the program regarding inappropriate or potentially damaging entries. Pretty much all you get from REGEDIT is a generic “are you sure?” prompt. So before you change anything, source the change from at least two reliable sources. I’ve seen some incorrect Registry values on the Web more than once, but the likelihood of two entirely different sites getting a value wrong is less than one site getting it wrong. Fourth and last (at least for our purposes here), there is no “find all” capability in REGEDIT. You can search for a string or substring, but you won’t get a list of hits; you’ll be directed to the first hit, then you have to tap F3 to move to the next hit. Can you spell t-e-d-i-o-u-s? Norton solved this problem a decade or so ago, with their now-defunct Norton Registry Editor, but Microsoft never has. Next time I’ll write a little bit about using REGEDIT in the Windows Recovery Environment, or WinRE, which is fresh in my mind because I had to do it just last week!
