There is a growing problem in Windows XP of registry keys that have, quite literally,
I'd estimate that 50% of the situations where computer owners are told to destructively "Reinstall Windows" are due to this one problem.
I've spend hours with Microsoft's SUBINACL to remedy these problems, but as a command-line tool, it's clumsy, the output is hard to decipher, and often, the results it produces are incomplete.
What I'd love to see in a future
Using SUBINACL, I search for and find a key with "No Permissions." I then, manually, set the Owner (which is usually empty) to "Administrator" (or "Administrators"), and grant "Everyone" "Full Control" permissions. Then, I force the key to inherent the higher-order permissions. Finally, I go back and remove the uninherited permissions in the ACL (i.e., the "Everyone" I added earlier).
Already, "Registry Workshop" (http://www.torchsoft.com/en/rw_information.html) shows keys without permissions in red. But, that's inadequate; it only triggers the complex manual process above.
This problem is big, and growing, and I'd love to have an tool that would help me solve it. I've spend hours salvaging systems that would have taken days to rebuild (e.g., hundreds of apps); having a tool that does the hard work would be a godsent.
