Registry cleaner too Aggressive

[Roedy]

I strongly suspect the Ace Registry Cleaner has been too aggressive. I have used it for a long time without incident under W2K. I think this new version is the problem.

I discovered the following programs that were working fine stopped working after it ran. I am in the process of flipping from Win2K to Vista on my new machine. I have been experimenting with XP as well.

1. Vista. Would not reboot. It said the registry was corrupt, though I could read it fine in maintenance mode. That took weeks to recover from -- probably just one critical entry turfed by mistake. I could not run Ace to attempt a recover. Perhaps something you can run from maintenance mode is needed.

2. NTI CD maker

3. NTI Backup

4. CSE HTML Validator

All were fine after a reinstall.

It is unwise to yank entries in uninstall sections where the file does not exist. It may well exist by uninstall time, and without the entry, you leave an orphan. Ditto log files, which are not yet created, but the program needs the name of the file when it does get around to creating it.

[Aneesh]

If an issue occurs after cleaning the registry, it can be repaired by merging, in most cases, the deleted entries. As you know, the Registry cleaner creates a backup file when removing entries from the registry. To merge a particular backup file, you don't necessarily need to open Ace Utilities. Just go to the backup folder (in your 'documents' folder, by default) and double click the file you want to merge.

If you find that the registry cleaner is finding some entries that you think it should not, then
* Right click on that particular entry, and choose the 'Exclude Always (Never find again)' option

OR

* Create a custom file, ex: 'ignore.dat', using Notepad in the /Data/Ignore_Reg subfolder inside your Ace Utilities installation folder. Inside this file,

[settings]
desc=<some description about the file>
index=0 1

[data]
0=NTI Backup
1=NTI CD maker

The custom file option is a bit trickier than the first one because you should make sure that you are using the correct and appropriate keywords in the [data] section so that the ignore-process works efficiently.

Also, make sure that you have enabled the 'Use ignore list' option while scanning.

To run under Vista, please make sure that you are using the latest version of Ace Utilities which is compatible with Vista.