Windows Registry Editor has no 'undo' feature, and you made no backups.
You are in a similar position to Humpty Dumpty after he had a great
fall. Hope for the best.
---
Leonard Grey
Errare humanum est

Lagomorph Mom wrote:
> Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop, Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz, 1 GB RAM,
> 51 GB Hard Disk, OEM version of MS Windows XP Media Edition 5.1.2600 - SP 3
>
> I know I've been very, very bad but I edited the registry w/o backing up the
> system and now, am frightened to reboot. After reading recent posts about
> staying out of the registry, I subscribed to this forum to find out if what I
> deleted will affect rebooting. Yes - after the damage is done.
>
> In the past 6 months, purely out of boredom while recovering from surgery,
> I've installed, played & uninstalled over 100 online games from dozens of
> websites purchasing only 6 licenses. After uninstalling the unwanted games,
> I assumed my hard drives' byte value would return to the size it was before I
> installed the game. Well...it didn't. Tracking files from
> Trymedia-ACTIVEmark plus user pref & config files for each game remained in
> Program File folders, Docs & Settings for both all users & my own folder, and
> some Start Up folders. Even though I uninstalled the games from Add/Remove
> Programs & deleted the user pref files through Windows Explorer, it recovered
> only a half to three-quarters of the disk space before the games were
> installed. I had to Defrag three times due to remnants of these games
> scattered all over the place. Sadly, this is where I had the epiphany of
> removing the remaining garbage using regedit as misguided as I was after
> reading threads on the forum.
>
> The keys and directories I removed from the registry trees were only under
> the game developer directories in LOCAL_MACHINE & CURRENT_CONFIG. I left the
> game developer directories alone, the games with purchased licenses and did
> not touch ANY of the Windows system files. After removing about a dozen
> keys, I got skiddish and came here. Now, I'm scared to reboot.
>
> Since I didn't touch any Windows data, can I reboot or do I need to have my
> hard drive re-imaged by Dell?
>
> MB
> (anxious & embarrassed)