Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Accidentally Blocked Regedit!

Accidentally Blocked Regedit and now want to access it! While making any attempts to access and change Registry settings, keep in mind that your wrong actions can harm Windows installation to the extent that complete operating system may require re-installation, which also means that all your installed applications will also require re-installation. So make sure that you are well aware of the consequences of your changes to it.

Now to our problem, remember that it's not any windows' external process that stops Registry tools from execution. It's the tool itself that needs to access Registry to read the "DisableRegistryTools" value and decide as to grant access or not. So let's take chance to find this particular string "DisableRegistryTools" in the Executable Regedit.exe. After all it's a string!

Before marching ahead backup the original file.

If you don't have access to any Hex Editor, the good old EDIT will do it for you. Go to command prompt and issue command "EDIT /60". This will open the EDIT in binary mode with each line carrying 60 bytes from the file that you open. Use file-Open from menu to open "Regedit.exe" and use page up/down to read through the Matrix! (Every time I open Binary files, movie 'The Matrix' flashes in my mind where the characters are all busy tweaking the binary characters of the Matrix Code). You will not be able to issue Search for this string as each character of the string has a Zero byte after it.

Not far from the Top you can trace the string "DisableRegistryTools". So the Regedit.exe looks for this value, and the whose valuedata is stopping your access to Regedit.exe. Making sure that you don't add a character to, or delete a character from this executable, change one of the character that makes this string. Say change it to "DisableRegistryFools" (changing T to F). Save the file and exit from the editor.

Now if you carefully did the above, Executing this tweaked application will grant you access to the Registry as it is now looking for wrong Registry entry which doesn't exist!

Statutory Warning : Tweaking Registry may be harmful To Your System's Health.