Editing the registry in NT

[Arkitech]

I have a question for the NT gurus out there.

Are there any programs or utilites that will scan through the NT registry and delete values that I specify?


Just to provide a little background information here is why I'm asking that question:

I'm working for a company with about 1200 nodes, 2 years ago they hired a few contractors to come in and install various software packages to their PCs. The contractors installed the MS Office 97 suite on all 1200 workstations from a remote PC. Here's where the nightmare begins, instead of completely installing all of the needed software on the local machines some visual basic code and other data was left to be accessed from the remote PC. So in other words I have 1200 PC's that are using a persistent connection to a remote PC to do something as simple as run Word or Excel.

A little more than a week ago the unthinkable happened, for some reason 300-400 machines suddenly had problems with MS Word. And just as of today I got a call where another 200 machines or so can't access Word. At first I thought if I just simply reinstalled the software then the data that was missing would automatically be added to the local machine. In theory it should have worked except for one little thing, NT workstations keep what is called a persistent connection. Which means that in order for the MS Office software to run locally you have to disable all references in the registry to the remote PC that it formerly used to run Word, Excel, etc. Ordinairly it should be removed when you uninstall the MS Office software but according to Microsoft there is a bug that prevents this from working properly.

If you're still with me at this point I'm just about done. Basically to fix the problem as I mentioned before you have to delete all references to this remote machine and then MS Office suite will function like it should. The problem is that there can be literally hundreds of different references, once removed it works fine. I have tested this several times to confirm it. So in order for me to get this done sometime in this century I need a program that will delete any value that I specify from the registry.


If you read all of this I'd appreciate any help or information you can give me. I'll probably cut and paste this over to Microsoft as well.

thanks

 

[thorin]

Try Registry Search + Replace

Or,

You can use ProcessExplorer from sysinternals:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml
to see what RegKeys a certain process is using.

Or you could use regmon (also from sysinternals) to view RealTime changes to the registry.

Thorin

 

[AndyHui]

You can do it with an inf file, as long as you know exactly what keys and values you are after. Just modify what I have below, with the keys that you want to get rid of. Once you have written up the inf file, simply right-click and select Install on each machine.

For example,

[Version]
Signature = "$Windows NT$"

[DefaultInstall]
DelReg=Delete_Old_Office

[Delete_Old_Office]
HKLM,Software\Microsoft\Office\PowerPoint\Addins\MultiMgrAddIn.AddInDesigner1,Description
HKLM,Software\Microsoft\Office\PowerPoint\Addins\MultiMgrAddIn.AddInDesigner1,FriendlyName