mchampfl
09-01-1999, 07:13 PM
as manager of about 65 pc's, i am constantly dealing with the stability of the users' pc's. so much of the instability i have encountered comes from registry issues. i spend a great deal of time evaluating methods to efficiently and effectively deal with registry problems. my experience compels me to pay attention to what may cause instability in the registry.
one obvious answer is the installation of additional software and utilities. another is the rampant negligence of uninstall procedures. the conclusion that i have drawn is that these miriad applications may 'step on each other' - that is, they generate a conflict. application 'A' wants to use a key this way, but 'B' has changed it to something else.
also, i believe that there is what i call the 'aquarius syndrome' - remember the song? 'when the moon is in the seventh house and jupiter aligns with mars'. this is when the circumstantial presence/content of certain keys awakens a bug in a piece of software. and, i believe, more often than not the circumstance is generated by some trigger outside of the application - but sometimes within.
example #1: a user's profile is no longer visible under administrator on nt40. he can login, work, no problems. but when logged in as administrator, his username is not visible, his profile directory can't be found, etc.
example #2: one day an nt40 user's pcanywhere remote stopped working, complaining that it could not find a particular .exe file in such-n-such directory. but the file is right where it said it couldn't find it. uninstall, reinstall, scour the registry... all for naught! now he borrows someone else's machine when he needs pcanywhere.
example #3: i use tweakui's auto login on a machine that has an unattended tape backup in case the power goes off - else the backup session won't run. it stopped working one day. so i go into tweakui, turn it off, turn it back on, and now all is ok!
example #4: one user has a single mapped network drive letter that is locked and unuseable. it shows up on the list, but it won't let you access it, delete it, remap it, or anything. he just simply has to use some other letter.
the question burns within me - what is causing these things?!?!? i can't afford the time to spend days dissecting these problems. even most tech support professionals will tell you when you call to reinstall/rebuild windows. not that they are not qualified/capable of figuring out the problem, it's just not an efficient use of time to do so. it's faster and easier to spend half a day rebuilding - not to mention all the other unknown or yet to happen cleanups you are doing at the same time.
so what are some of your theories, or even experience, as to why the registry gets clobbered in the process of normal use? can these tragedies be avoided by managing the way the pc is used - as opposed to registry restoration methods after the fact?
one obvious answer is the installation of additional software and utilities. another is the rampant negligence of uninstall procedures. the conclusion that i have drawn is that these miriad applications may 'step on each other' - that is, they generate a conflict. application 'A' wants to use a key this way, but 'B' has changed it to something else.
also, i believe that there is what i call the 'aquarius syndrome' - remember the song? 'when the moon is in the seventh house and jupiter aligns with mars'. this is when the circumstantial presence/content of certain keys awakens a bug in a piece of software. and, i believe, more often than not the circumstance is generated by some trigger outside of the application - but sometimes within.
example #1: a user's profile is no longer visible under administrator on nt40. he can login, work, no problems. but when logged in as administrator, his username is not visible, his profile directory can't be found, etc.
example #2: one day an nt40 user's pcanywhere remote stopped working, complaining that it could not find a particular .exe file in such-n-such directory. but the file is right where it said it couldn't find it. uninstall, reinstall, scour the registry... all for naught! now he borrows someone else's machine when he needs pcanywhere.
example #3: i use tweakui's auto login on a machine that has an unattended tape backup in case the power goes off - else the backup session won't run. it stopped working one day. so i go into tweakui, turn it off, turn it back on, and now all is ok!
example #4: one user has a single mapped network drive letter that is locked and unuseable. it shows up on the list, but it won't let you access it, delete it, remap it, or anything. he just simply has to use some other letter.
the question burns within me - what is causing these things?!?!? i can't afford the time to spend days dissecting these problems. even most tech support professionals will tell you when you call to reinstall/rebuild windows. not that they are not qualified/capable of figuring out the problem, it's just not an efficient use of time to do so. it's faster and easier to spend half a day rebuilding - not to mention all the other unknown or yet to happen cleanups you are doing at the same time.
so what are some of your theories, or even experience, as to why the registry gets clobbered in the process of normal use? can these tragedies be avoided by managing the way the pc is used - as opposed to registry restoration methods after the fact?