When i boot up my computer and the desktop appears (win98 SE) an error comes up saying there’s something wrong with the registry and i need to restart while it fixes it, it does this almost every time i start up the computer and things like recent documents goes back to how it was a week ago - why?! and how do i fix it??
thanks.
Check out Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 193903
Some possible causes;
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A virus or other unfriendly program. Run a full virus scan, if you haven’t, already. You might also try one of the programs, like AdAware, that looks for spyware.
Your registry has reached it’s maximum size limit. IIRC, in Win98, the default max is 64K. This can be changed, but I don’t have a 98 machine to look at to find the setting. Googling should find the info.
The fact that the problem recurs makes it sound like a virus or other unfriendly, possibly in combination with the max limit, but you would probably benefit from cleaning out your registry. A lot of programs do a pretty poor job of cleaning up after themselves.
There are commercial programs designed to clean up the registry, but Microsoft has a utility called RegClean4.1 that does a pretty good job. It used to be readily available as a free download from their site. If it’s not, Googling will probably find it, as well.
One caveat on any registry cleaners; if your registry is badly corrupted/damaged, they may cause some programs to stop working. You’ll simply need to reinstall them.
(WARNING: Do not run RegClean on machines running Win2K or newer operating systems! It was designed for older OS’s and may cause problems on newer OS’s. It’s perfectly safe for Win98, though.)
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I prefer RegSeeker myself. Note that almost all of these Registry cleaning apps create backups by default too.