Odd Windows Error

[Poppa_Meth]

My girlfriend just called and said here PC has given her an error message twice now. It's something to the effect of "System Registry is Full" This started happening after she tried Defraggler and it locked up and blue screened twice on her during the defrag. I narrowed that down to a compatibility issue with her older Kerio firewall. I haven't been able to go look at the PC again since this has happened, but I'd like to try and find the answer before I go back to her house. I'm not having much luck googling it and I've never seen the issue before myself. Any suggestions on a fix?

[wtsinnc]

Just out of curiosity, how did you narrow down the problem to the firewall ? If you are absolutely certain that the firewall is at fault, uninstall it and add a newer version (Sunbelt) or Online Armor (free) or Zone Alarm (free).

What operating system is on her computer ?
Are you certain that the defrag application she is using is compatible with that particular OS ? I have had total success with the free version of Auslogics on W2K, XP, and Vista.

If the hard drive itself is filled nearly to capacity, you might need to delete some files; defraggers need some free HDD space to do their thing.

If she hasn't done so already, she might try to use system restore to return her system state to a point prior to the first incident.


Good luck !

[Nelson37]

Need LOTS more information.

Is this "Defraggeler" some third-party app and not the built-in "Defrag"?

It may be fine and there is some other issue, but my first guess would be that it's a piece of crap which has now screwed up the registry unmercifully.

CCCleaner, System Restore, and some serious application control is in order.

There is a very good reason I avoid third-party system utilities unless they do something that just CAN'T be done with standard, built-in software. MS Defrag may be slow, and somewhat ineffecient, but it does the job, and almost never has incompatibilities, or causes BSODs or registry corruption.

Too much risk for too little gain.

[Poppa_Meth]

Defraggler is made by the same people that make CCleaner. Yes I'm sure it was a problem between the firewall and the defragger. After running probably 20 minutes Kerio popped up an access message. It was several minutes until I noticed it. When I clicked Allow, it blue screened. I've never had that issues with Defraggler on 6 other PCs I've tried it on. I usually use JKDegrag and have never had such issues with that. I won't be using Defraggler anymore anyway. It's way too slow compared to JKDfrag.

She is running Windows XP Home on an AMD rig. Hard drive has over 50GB free. I plan on trying System restore. I'm just not certain if that will restore the registry or now. I don't know a great deal about system restore. I don't generally use it since I have Acronis on all my own systems.

I'm assuming that it blue screened while Defraggler was moving the registry and something got screwed up because of that. There hasn't been any other apparent issues with the computer as a result of all this.

Thanks for all the input.

[grossjamesh]

Check the DRWatson.log and post the error for the last blue screen. Please

[Poppa_Meth]

I'll get it as soon as I can. It may be this coming weekend though.

[Poppa_Meth]

Problem seems to be fixed by a system restore and redoing all her windows updates. I looked at the event log and Dr. Watson files and oddly enough there are no errors reported.

[Poppa_Meth]

Well the issue has resurfaced. This time I found an error message in the event log. Any help figuring this out will be much appreciated.

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Application Popup
Event Category: None
Event ID: 26
Date: 12/02/2008
Time: 1:07:37 AM
User: N/A
Computer: xxxx-xx
Description:
Application popup: Windows - Low On Registry Space : The system has reached the maximum size allowed for the system part of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[aedipuss]

you really do have a weird one there. it isn't even possible to get low on registry space in windows XP. that's an old NT error. from microsoft -
<<In Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and in Microsoft Windows XP, the Registry Size Limit (RSL) functionality has been removed. Therefore, there are no longer any limits on the total amount of space that may be consumed by registry data (hives) in paged pool memory, and in disk space.>>

more likely a corrupted hive. if it were mine i'd back up the necessary data, reformat and reinstall XP.

[Poppa_Meth]

I thought that as well. I installed Microsofts UPH Cleanup tool to try and fix any issues with the hives but no good so far. Right now I don't have the time to put into a full reinstall of her system. Of course it doesn't seem to be causing any actual problems so far, just annoyances. Thanks for the input.