Registry question

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

... as the back-ups of WIN.INI and APPPATCHES.reg I keep in my "REG PATCHES" folder were last modified in late 2004.

(removed cool picture of folder)

From looking at your collection of reg patches, I see we think alike. I have a similar collection of removed registry data that I can re-insert when I need it. This is all about keeping the registry to a reasonable size (for me, export less than 20 MB).

One of the best illustrations as to how ridiculous the waste can be: I have one older Kodak camera that requires the stupid EasyShare crapware to access the photos. So I audited and isolated every frickin reg entry and put it into a REG 'inserter' (merged when I need to use the camera). And I created a corresponding deleter that yanks those entries (used after done with camera). Here are the sizes of the reg files:

Kodak_C340_REGISTRY_(add).reg ... 3,914,511

Kodak_C340_REGISTRY_(del).reg ..... 326,718

That size added to many registries might push it over the tipping point on a reboot ('OUT OF MEMORY'). As big as that 4 MB file is, it would even be larger had I used their longer duhfault pathnames! And yet, even larger still had I not commented out the non-functional waste of MSI Installer keys and SharedDLLs and much more.

Here is a tip for anyone else that does stuff like this, if you insert 4 MB into the registry and then delete it, you still have a sizeable collection of holes in the actual SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files. Currently for this computer I calculate a .76 ratio:

19.2 MB ASCII Export == 14.6 MB DATs (apprx)

So this Kodak EasyShare add/delete process leaves about 2.9 MB bytes of real holes in the DATs. They need to be removed by 'compacting' the registry (I mentioned using the free RegCompact in this thread).

Even though this process appears safe, it is not bulletproof. Worse-Case Scenario would be that you add some large chunk of data to the registry and then the power goes out. Possible FUBAR unless you have recently saved DAT files that you could manually restore in F8 Command Line mode. It really pays to save everything (exports and DATs) as often as you can.

EDIT: (huh, previous edit got lost somehow!?!) I just wanted to point out that the size of that registry add (3,914,511 bytes) does not necessarily all get added to the current size. It is the maximum that the registry will grow. The reason is that there are common key structures in a .REG which already exist, thus they cannot be added. The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\ prefix will not be added obviously, only new keys that are suffixes to it. Also note that any commented-out sections will not get added to the registry but they do show up in the filesize of the .REG file naturally.

Edited October 13, 2008 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[Dude111]

I just found some entries for 'PASSPORT' and it has www.passport.com in all but 2 of them....

I dont use email/etc from M$,can i delete these entries also?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\SSO\Passport1.4

Thats one of them..... I have 5

I assume these are M$ keys for when someone uses POP EMAIL with them.

Edited November 18, 2008 by Dude111

[BenoitRen]

Sounds like strings from an MSN Messenger version.

[Multibooter]

I have a similar collection of removed registry data that I can re-insert when I need it. This is all about keeping the registry to a reasonable size (for me, export less than 20 MB).

On my old laptop with over 100 apps, installed during the past 7 years, the Win98 registry has 9MB as an exported .reg; System.dat is 6.3MB, User.dat 1.1MB. I usually don't fiddle around with the registry, so I am amazed that it is so much smaller than yours. Besides that Kodak stuff, did you identify any other hogs?

[herbalist]

A 20MB registry export does seem quite large. The registry on my primary 98 box exported at 9.86MB. Its system.dat is 6.36MB. The user.dat files are 388KB, 780KB, and 472KB. It's a multi-profile setup that's had well over 100 apps installed which includes WMP9 (Keys added: 1401), Netframework 2.0 (Keys added: 8507), Open Office (Keys added: 2150), DirectX 9 (Keys added: 2808), Adobe Acrobat (Keys added: 195), E-sword (Keys added: 373), and the 98 resource kit (Keys added: 273). Yet yours is twice this size. Are you sure that bloat isn't from MRUs and other usage tracks? There's a very good thread regarding the size of the 98 registry here.

CharlotteTheHarlot

When you get the registry down to the size you want and it's all cleaned up and optimized, you could use an on-demand batch file to make copies of the .dat files, then make another that will use those copies to overwrite the existing .dat files. The 2nd batch could be called from autoexec.bat and would replace your registry with optimized copies at each restart. This would put an end to bloat, usage records, and registry fragmentation problems.

Rick

[Dude111]

A full exported reg file for me is around 6 megs or so.....

I tried removing all the PASSPORT keys and stored them locally,opened IE and surfed a few sites then used regseeker again and checked for any PASSPORT entries and found that IE had re-created 1 key..

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Passport

So i just put them all back for now....

Edited November 20, 2008 by Dude111

[herbalist]

6MB is quite small for the entire registry. Even if you can shrink it down more, I doubt you'll see much in the way of improved performance. I'd delete the MRUs and usage tracks with the cleaning tools mentioned in this thread, then use RegCon to compact it. It's one of the utilities in Regutils.7z, linked in the above mentioned thread. Once that is done, make copies of system.dat and user.dat. You can replace the existing files with these from DOS or you can write a batch file to automate the process. Automating the process will allow you to always boot with a clean, compacted, and unfragmented registry.

Rick

[Drugwash]

I've only read the beginning of the first post in that thread and that's been enough for me. My last registry backup - which is done automatically by scanreg about every day - is a 4,487,924 bytes cabinet containing system.dat (16,228,384 bytes), user.dat (1,937,440 bytes), system.ini (2,833 bytes) and win.ini (10,541 bytes).

The system boots just fine (although a bit slow, but not only for this reason). I have TortoiseSVN, Visual C++ 6, Visual Basic 6, MS Platform SDK feb 2003 and Office XP installed among many other applications and I've done enough testing by installing/uninstalling another bunch of applications and drivers, without ever having to restore the OS. Not to mention the HDD, as is, had been directly taken off a broken mobo with different chipset/sound/video and plugged into this rig.

The only things I do is completely wipe out Cookies, History, Temp, Temporary Internet Files at boot time (a few lines in autoexec.bat) together with other wise choices in TweakUI regarding Recent Documents in Start menu, cleaning traces, etc. and a registry combing with Registry Medic 3 every few months when I happen to remember about it.

Call me lucky.

P.S. As I read further into that thread, it reminded me I also have DirectX 9.0c dec2007 updated by soporific, .NET 1.1 and 2.0 installed, which - they say - should write "huge amount of CLSIDs keys".

P.P.S. Scanreg optimization is enabled (Optimize=1). Total RAM is 256MB PC133, 4 x 32 GB FAT32 partitions + 1 x 8 GB Linux swap partition (readable under Win9x through a Total Commander plug-in).

Edited November 21, 2008 by Drugwash

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Hey folks. I'm on my Win98se master system now. It has my largest Win9x registry of all, currently exporting at 19,540,597 ASCII bytes. The binary SYSTEM.DAT is 12,267,552; and USER.DAT is 3,375,136. This one is highly tuned and manually cleaned and there is no waste. Currently it has just 512 MB RAM although when I can spare them I often up it to 1024.

The RAM is the deciding factor as to what the registry "OUT OF MEMORY" (aka "too large to fit in memory" or "insufficient memory...") tipping point is, and as far as I know there is no calculation to easily determine this as subkey complexity is also a factor. I've had exports of around 25 MB but I cannot remeber how much RAM was in the box that day. Keeping exports under 20 MB is an arbitrary discipline on my own part based on long experience and some intuition.

HKCR will typically take up one half the total size. Here is what I just exported: 9,119,507 bytes in CLASSES (the only real advantage to WinME should be obvious, it would be nice to retrofit that REGEDIT to Win98se). Within those CLASSES are the big three: CLSID 4,741,981, Interface 1,830,654, and TypeLib 568,080. Other large areas are in the easily flushable ActiveX Cache and Explorer UserAssist sections.

FWIW, being my main development system it has the proverbial kitchen sink installed: every compiler and IDE I use plus too many support apps to count. This is how the registry really grows, needless COM bloat from software that insists on self-registering every possible object and library some executeable might need. Thankfully the good stuff I use day to day is pretty light on registry bloat (Opera, IrfanView, UltraEdit, GOMp, WinRar, PFE, most Games, Hacking Utilities, References). But stuff like Corel, Office, some Cameras, SoundForge, Adobe, InstallShield, Screenshot apps, (ad nauseum) still blindly follow Microsoft's insane duhfault habit of exploding the registry.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, there are some things that can be done to shrink the registry footprint. Case in point, I was recently able to remove a pile of screenshot apps (SnagIt, FliSoft, HyperSnap, InBit, a few more) which used a couple of needless MB and just use the perfectly adequate (and free) MwSnap and IrfanView. I removed the .NET Framework(s) as well (big loss). I yanked Real Player and all its illegally long keys and values. Another massive example (but not for the faint of heart) I removed all the MSI sections, all of them. Some icon keys needed to be re-routed but I tested all the apps and NONE of them required the MSI hooks. Total savings was many MB of registry exports. If you install the PlatformSDK you will see just how much needless crap goes into that key structure, gigantic keys pointing to every dang .c and .h file in the package. Only Microsoft could have invented that MSI monster (hint: all of the data belongs in a private file!).

But if you think this is something, those of you on WinXP right now export this key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TrayNotify]

Pay particular attention to the value called: "PastIconsStream".

Edited November 21, 2008 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

To add to this...

If you open WIN.INI in notepad, you'll notice that under

[ModuleCompatibility]

you'll find the same list of apps that are also listed under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\AppPatches

Has anyone tried removing those in WIN.INI... to streamline it a bit?

@whatever420 ... Just wanted to follow up on my post #13 above in which I originally replied to this quoted post of yours.

I commented out everything in the [ModuleCompatibility] section in Win.ini back on 4-October (about 50 days ago). No problems or differences noticed at all.

Thanks again for finding that.