Solved Unable to remove Registry redundant entries

[OLDJACK]

Many moons ago I used windows Virtual PC when upgrading from XP. Time passes and items get deleted and now I find that my registry cleaner detects about 20 useless entries all relating to VirtualBox. It cannot delete these entries and I tried manually and also failed .They all are owned by SYSTEM and I cannot set this to a new owner. The permissions for System and for Administrator are for READ and Full Control (they are both greyed out). I tried a clever little program called RegOwnershipEx (winaero.com) which I hoped would solve the problem but it too failed. Anyone know of a solution to this annoyance?

 

[Berton]

Which Registry cleaner are you using? Have you tried it in Safe Mode? Are there any remnants of VirtualPC left on the HDD? One could try manually deleting entries in the Registry but always have to keep in mind the Registry has 5 parts and items will be present in 2 or more of those parts, they are text files called Hives.

 

[OLDJACK]

Thank you Berton,
I haven't tried Safe Mode ,but surely the ownership is the snag?I use RegSupreme which has never failed me before. Searched HDD for VirtualBox and no results.

 

[Sir George]

Many moons ago I used windows Virtual PC when upgrading from XP. Time passes and items get deleted and now I find that my registry cleaner detects about 20 useless entries all relating to VirtualBox. It cannot delete these entries and I tried manually and also failed .They all are owned by SYSTEM and I cannot set this to a new owner. The permissions for System and for Administrator are for READ and Full Control (they are both greyed out). I tried a clever little program called RegOwnershipEx (winaero.com) which I hoped would solve the problem but it too failed. Anyone know of a solution to this annoyance?

By used "Windows Virtual PC" do you mean you installed the software? If so, have you since then removed it and are now trying to eliminate the registry entries?

 

[MilesAhead]

Many moons ago I used windows Virtual PC when upgrading from XP. Time passes and items get deleted and now I find that my registry cleaner detects about 20 useless entries all relating to VirtualBox. It cannot delete these entries and I tried manually and also failed .They all are owned by SYSTEM and I cannot set this to a new owner. The permissions for System and for Administrator are for READ and Full Control (they are both greyed out). I tried a clever little program called RegOwnershipEx (winaero.com) which I hoped would solve the problem but it too failed. Anyone know of a solution to this annoyance?

You may have to boot a recovery disk or WinPE that has a copy of Regedit or another registry editor to edit the Registry offline. If you google there should be some online guides. I don't want to post any because some also have tutorials on forbidden topics.

 

[OLDJACK]

Thank yo both,
If I remember correctly it was a Windows Virtual Pc program which used VirtualBox. It is no longer on my laptop but I still have VirtualBox remnants in the Registry which are an annoyance rather than a problem. I'll take a look at WinPE.

 

[carwiz]

Windows VM-XP does NOT use VirtualBox. These are two different VM applications. As is VMware Player and several others. I have Windows VM-XP installed now and have had VirtualBox and VMware Player installed alternately at various times and never had a problem using CCleaner to remove leftovers.

 

[OLDJACK]

Thank you Carwiz, I've just tried CCleaner, it did find more rubbish in my registry BUT it did not locate the 20 VirtualBox entries.

 

[carwiz]

What VBox entries? As I noted, Microsoft's XP Mode does not use VBox. Perhaps you still have VBox installed.

 

[OLDJACK]

Thanks everyone ,the solution was as suggested, start in Safe mode and I was able to change the Owner and thus delete.

 

[Callender]

Re: RegOwnershipEx - are you using it correctly? Take ownership of the desired key and leave the program running while you delete the key using regedit. If you need to take ownnership of a registry key and sub keys to delete subkeys remember to restore ownership afterwards.

If that fails here are more tools that I usually use:

Download PC Hunter - MajorGeeks - use the registry tab and navigate to the entries and try deleting them one at a time.

If that doesn't work try PowerTool:

EDIT: PowerTool link removed by poster.

If neither of those work try: BlitzBlank Download - you can see the example scripts provided.

Note: It's not wise to mess about with any of the above software without having a system image backup and restore option in place.

 

[OLDJACK]

I used RegOwnershipEx on a couple of other entries with no problem but on the unwanted VirtualBox entries the owner came up as Unknown so for some reason it couldn't read the actual owner. The Safe Mode route worked so all is well, though it was interesting that CCleaner didn't detect any of the 20 entries.
My thanks to all who offered possible solutions.