I have a set of Micron PCs running Windows 98SE (crap in my opinion) that frequently have registry problems. I have reloaded the system(s) several times but after a couple of weeks or months, I recieve errors. I've called support, searched tons of web pages, etc. I've run into this problem on at least 6 machines, and sometimes it'll go away, sometimes it is there every morning.

Specs are something like... MicronPC, 500mhz, 128mb ram, integrated everything. Saltos motherboard (crap again) Completely updated, patched everything.


I'm no stranger to the registry and am pretty comfortable working in there.

The errors I recieve are at startup: Windows has encounterd a problem accessing the registry. Windows will reboot and fix the problem for you.

It does reboot... but it does not fix the problem. It will do a continuous loop if you let it. Startup, reboot, startup, reboot, etc.

The funny thing is... if I let the dialogue box sit there, and try to access the registry via run regedit, I have no problem. I can access, browse, delete, add, etc. I am also able to run programs without a problem which look to the registry first.

I can boot to command prompt and do a

c:\scanreg /restore

to restore to an earlier date... or

c:\scanreg /fix

to backup the current one and create a new one.

I'm now thinking that the windows registry checker is falsely reporting this. To test it, I just disabled the registry checker at startup. Sure enough, I had no problems getting that error or anything. So, that problem is solved...

...but did I create a bigger problem?

I know that the registry checker scans it for errors and creates a backup of it by default at every boot, system change, etc. It typically stores about 8-10 registry backups...

Is this something that I should worry about? It will no longer backup the registry by itself... Should I create a task to run it once a week? Or run it manually only when I run updates or a upgrade?

What could be some other problems by turning off the registry checker?

Thanks in advance!