With tens of thousands of lines in a registry, it's hard to find the one or two that is missing or invalid.  I searched my own registry with regedit, edit,  search, didn't find string VirtualDeviceDriver.  VDD appears frequently.  I just deleted Norton AV myself a few days ago, and can't imagine it deleted every last shred from my system completely.  If you try executing all the installed software and everything works, I would leave well enough alone.  Only other option if the computer isn't used for much, would be to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything.  That might not be too painful, depending on how much software is installed and whether or not you have a recovery disk set.  It also cleans out accumulated junk.
Paul Hachmeyer   
________________________________________
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gordon Totty [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Windows XP error message

I may have posted this question before but got no answer that I remember.  In scouring an old version of Norton's AntiVirus off my father-in-law's computer I may have gone too far, as I stripped something out of the Registry (Windows XP)and ever since he gets the following message on boot:

"16-bit Windows Subsystem
"SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\VirtualDeviceDrivers. VDD. Virtual device driver format in the registry is invalid.  Choose Close to terminate the application."

Then the message box gives two choices, Close and Ignore.  It doesn't seem to matter which he selects, the computer operates normally until the next boot when the error message reappears.

Thought it is harmless, it is an annoyance and I'd like to fix it for him since I probably caused it to begin with.  Guilt is an awful emotion!

I've had no luck finding a solution in books on the XP Registry or on the Internet in various forums.  The Microsoft site recognizes an identical message with "MS-DOS" appearing where the word Windows appears in the error message, but has no record of my father-in-law's message.

I've looked in the Registry under the stated path and there is nothing there.  Two different registry repair programs have failed to pick this up.

This happened months ago so restoring a previous configuration seems out of the question now.  Should have done that immediately, but I don't see his system that often.  When he first called me about it I told him to hit Ignore and that seemed to fix things.

Can anyone help?  I need an idea of what to tweak in the registry to make a driver format valid, I guess.

Gordon Totty
      
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