Number 213 - February 2001

Dumpster Diving In The Registry, and other matters
by Jean Wilcox, Oct 2000 Suncoast Beeper, St Petersburg, FL
If you really want to find out how your registry works all you have to do is go directly to your Windows installation CD. It is not the easiest reading in the world, but it won't kill you. There is a normal help file attached to it that has the usual index and keyword search and table of contents. When you find a term or phrase you don't understand, it will generally be underlined. One click at that point gives you the answer to your immediate question and then you can continue with your reading.     On the Windows 95 CD, go to Admin\Reskit\Helpfile\ Win95rk.hlp. This is the file you need. Double-click it and away you go. Copy it to your hard drive if you like. You can always delete it later if you choose. If you are using either Windows98 or 98SE you're in luck, as there is even more information here. The path in either of the 98s will be the same; to wit, Tools\Reskit\Help\RK98Book.chm. This file with the extension of .chm is the book itself. Double-clicking it opens it. In the same directory you will find Win98rk.hlp which is a help file in the same form as the one I described for Win95. There is also a text file called (what else?), ReadMe.doc. I would suggest you start with this, as it is full of information that makes the rest of it a lot easier. This ReadMe tells you how to set up the resource kit book on your Start menu, (if you want to, and why not?), a list of all the files associated with the resource kit itself and what they do, and a whole lot of other very useful dope. I highly recommended Starting here. If there is something you don't understand, and unless you're a Microsoft techie, I promise you that there is, just keep on reading. It'll clear itself up after a while. Then just go into either the help file or the .chm and look up Registry.     Whether you'll end up wanting to be a registry dabbler or not is beside the point. It will help you understand what's going on in there and dispel the notion that it's all black magic. It's not, of course, and it's really very interesting. For instance, there are, as I'm sure you already know, six areas that are found when you run REGEDIT. They are all called Hkey-Something-Or other. Did you know that only two of them. LOCAL-MACHINE and CURRENT-USER actually do anything? All of the other four are redundant and contain the same information as those first two, just written in another form. Any changes made, either by you or by the operating system, are written twice. When one is changed, the other gets changed, too. Maybe that part really is black magic. I'll have to go back and read it again to be sure.	Well, on to the aforementioned other matters. Sometimes a particular error message may have a fairly specific repair method. If you have been getting a lot of KERNEL32.DLL errors, it might be a good time to clean out your swap file. This will often prove to be the answer; not always, but very often. And what is a swap file you ask, and where is it? Its name is WIN386.swp and at my house it's in my C:\Windows root directory. Windows sets it up on your hard drive and uses it as it would memory. When its brain gets full and it can't remember any more, it makes a note in the swap file. When the brain clears up a little, it looks in the swap file, gets whatever is written there deals with it, and if we're lucky, deletes the garbage left behind in the .swp. Sometimes we're lucky; sometimes we're not. When we're not, that detritus left behind can eventually cause problems.     Windows automatically creates the swap file. If it needs it and can't find it, it just makes another one, so you can delete away without a care in the world. But you can't do it inside Windows itself. You're going to have to drop to DOS to do it, and I don't mean a prompt in a DOS box within Windows, either. I mean real DOS - reboot, interrupt the boot by hitting F8 when it says, "Starting Windows", look carefully at the ensuing menu, choose "command prompt only", and face the real world. Once you see that "C:\" on a black screen you're in business.     Assuming you had the foresight to check out the true location of Win386.swp on your own machine before you started all this, all you have to do at this point is navigate to the place of residence, which in my case would entail typing CD WINDOWS, (change directory to Windows). If yours is in a different place, then CD to wherever it is. After you reach the proper location, type DEL WIN386.SWP and press Enter. Then reboot again and presto, change-o, a new clean swap file. If your Windows Explorer or My Computer is set up to hide all file extensions or even just hidden ones, then you'll first have to change that before you can even find the thing. But that's no big deal.     Many of you know that it's possible to manage your own swap file without consulting Windows at all. You can put it anywhere on the hard drive you like, and make it any particular size that suits your own needs. If you know how to do this, and have done it, then the same thing applies to it. Delete it in DOS, then go back to your advanced configuration and recreate a fresh one. This is not guaranteed to eliminate a KERNEL32.DLL error, but it is guaranteed not to hurt your computer, and it stands a fair chance of clearing up existing problems and maybe even preventing future ones.
Number 213 - February 2001