[Curley_Boy]

How does Windows mesure the 'size' of the registry (as revealed on the property sheet where you set up your pagefile)?

The size currently reported (14mb) is not the same as when I select the files in the system32\config folder (and does it include my ntuser.dat, and usrclass.dat in their aswell?)

How does the size of the registry in RAM relate to the size of the files on the hard disk?

Example: I recently deleted my 'HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet004' entry (my last failed configuration, as reported in the 'select' key). The size of the exported .reg file was a couple of Mb, so I expected that the reported size of the registry would decrease... nope! In fact my registry has been growing. It 'should' be around 12Mb (Windows 2000 Pro, with all my software installed), but after a few regenerations (and subsequent removals) of redundant 'ControlSet00x' keys the overall size has reportedly increased by 2Mb.

Can someone explain (preferably in English) why the size continues to go up, when the amount of keys and values stored in the registry remain comparatively the same?

[DS3Circuit]

[Curley_Boy]

Thank you very much indeed for this info

I have been trying out the dureg and instaler tools from the MS reskit. Finally I can find out where all the space is going (and get rid of all the junk). I was already familiar with the built-in features of the regedt32 (the 'File Manager' UI lives! :x) and regedit apps, but I had not come across Windiff (I will give this a go next time I try another great "merge n purge" in the registry).

However I am still as to a loss of where the extra mb of space in the registry came from (as unfortunately I didn't know about any of those reskit tools at the time)...

What happened was I dumped ControlSet002 (my default control set) to disk as a .reg file (from regedit). Then ran a search (through notepad) for all mentions of 'ControlSet002' and replaced them with 'ControlSet003' (my last known good set). Then I erased 'ControlSet003' from the registry and merged the updated .reg file as my new 'last known good'.

To cut a long story short I was trying to ensure that my last known good was in perfect sync with my current control set (bar one tweak I was going to add). There had been a previous occasion where I needed to use the back up set and the two weren't in sync and everything got messed up. So I was suprised to find that after merging the new file (in which only one value was different between the two complete sets) there was a huge overall size increase. I also know for a fact that no other programs or drivers were installed between reboots to account for it.

Well perhaps armed with my new set of tools bloats like this in the future will be less common.

[Curley_Boy]

Damn posted twice by mistake (and I can't delete it)

this is an edit (ignore!!)