Thank you, thank you, Don, I am so glad to know where this is because I have a LOT of services disabled and I am planning to reinstall my OS because I can find no other way to get rid of an NVIDIA item that was already installed when I made my first Acronis image.  I wasn't looking forward to doing them all by hand again.

When I was talking about remnants of uninstalled programs being left in the registry, I was talking about programs  that had been uninstalled AFTER the registry backup was made that was now being restored - because the registry being restored would have no way to know that the program had been uninstalled after the backup was made.  Confusing-sounding, I know.

AnnaSummers

P.S.  Whoops!  It doesn't look like the same services (disabled-manual-automatic) that I see in Start - Administrative Tools - Services.   I'm confused now.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Don Penlington 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 10:12 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] disabling services in Vista


Anna wrote:
>The services settings are probably in the registry, but I've not looked 
>for them yet and I wouldn't guarantee it.>>


You are right Anna. I've since located the registry section at :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services.

Exporting and replacing that section and rebooting  does the trick of 
backing up and restoring your Service settings.

Using ERU is an option, but is overkill for just saving Service settings. 
Restoring the entire registry may, as you point out, have unwanted side 
effects, although it's an excellent way to restore sagging performance in 
general and will fix many glitches. I much prefer it to System Restore, as 
it's far more efficient than any registry cleaner can possibly be.

And, no, ERU doesn't leave remnants of old uninstalled progs behind, as ERU 
completely replaces the entire registry.

On the other hand, simply backing up the registry manually to a .reg file 
is NOT a good way to backup the registry for general purposes. Restoring a 
.reg file simply merges or combines the contents of the .reg file into the 
existing registry, so that you end up with more, not less.

Don Penlington


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