Registry Clean and Repair

Do you have multiple users on the same computer? This is more common in the corporate rather than the home environment although often you will have a family of several people sharing the same PC.

When I used to work in a large office, frequently we would get people who needed a program to be configured the same as a colleague – often these were totally new employees.

So we would basically copy the registry from one user’s PC to the other.

Now this is all well and good in most cases where software configuration is stored under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE.

Unfortunately, many programs also store configuration data on a per user basis. So it would be stored under HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Example Copying Of Registry Data

Let’s say that Bob is an old employee and logged in. Chad is the new guy. Of course when they are both logged in separately then you can easily copy from one machine to another. Just use the “Connect Network Registry Option” and it’s very easy.

But sometimes you need to copy registry data when someone is not logged in. If they’re not logged in then their data won’t be stored under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. So what do you do then?

HKEY_USERS

Registry data for anyone who has logged in before is stored under HKEY_USERS (incidentally, in the corporate environment this is one reason for a bloated registry because sometimes 100 people may have logged onto the same machine in the past).

If you expand this part of the registry then there will be a number of weird SIDs that Windows uses to identify different users.  Some are filled with nothing. You can easily find the one for the user you need by just expanding all the trees.

To check the login name, just right-click and go to Properties and you can see which usernames have properties to modify their own registry data.

Well I hope that this helped. If it did or you have any other questions then please just leave a comment. Cheers.