The Registry Keys and Their Subkeys

Adding and Deleting Entire Keys

Adding a key doesn't really do much for your operating system in itself. Windows probably won't even recognize it. It would just waste space in the Registry.

However, in some cases a company may have a fix for a device or software that involves adding a key or a value. This addition will be noticed by the operating system.

You may be searching Microsoft's Knowledge Base (surely you've used it!) with a problem you can't solve, and that fix may also involve adding a new key or value.

Open the Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Microsoft
and highlight the key 'Microsoft'.

Now right click on 'Microsoft', choose 'New', and click 'Key'. You've just created a new subkey of 'Microsoft'. Name it 'Custom', and press enter.

Now right click on the key 'Custom', choose 'New', and click 'String Value'. Name the new value you've created 'Subscribe', and press enter. Next, double-click on the value 'Subscribe', and in the Value data box type PC ComputerNotes. Click OK.

Go ahead and shut down the Registry Editor. You don't need to refresh the desktop because this new key, and its value, will do absolutely nothing. So now we want to delete it, because it's just taking up space.

Start the Registry Editor again, and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Microsoft\Custom. If you click on the Custom key, you'll see the value and its data in the right pane. But we want to get rid of it!

Simply right click on the key 'Custom', in the left pane of the Registry Editor, and choose 'Delete'. It'll ask if you are sure you want to delete the key. Click Yes.

You just deleted a key and all the values and data associated with it (which wasn't much in this case). If the key had ten subkeys, they all would have disappeared too.

When would you possibly use this? Well, if you have programs that have not been deleted properly, you'll end up with phantom messages at startup telling you about missing files that are still referred to in the Registry. That's because the Registry entry, and key for that program is still in the Registry. You could do a search based on a few things:

- You could search the Registry for the actual name of the program. If you found a key with the program's name, it's probably safe to remove that entire branch by deleting the key and all it's contents.

- You could search for the filename that's been appearing at startup. If you found reference to it in the Registry, you would check the parent keys until you found the branch you felt needed to be removed.

If you removed a program and it still shows up in the 'Add/Remove Programs' application, then do a search for that. Remove the value or key from the Registry.