While looking around for a particular utility, I ended up on Google Code just dredging through all the projects they have online. As I went through, I kept opening tabs to more and more applications that sounded interesting. I found enough applications worth sharing that I decided to post one per day this week and highlight some hidden treasures of Google Code.
Day #5: Unregistry
Unregistry is simple in principle but very helpful in practice. Messing around with the Registry gets to be a day-to-day task for some IT. There exist these horribly written programs that store too much in the Registry and in keys that standard user’s don’t have permission to write in. There are also just standard troubleshooting errors and permissions problems; you are not likely to be a stranger to the Registry. Unregistry helps serve one vital role with mucking around in the Registry: removing keys that were put there.
Unregistry makes use of a .REG script. It could be a fix you downloaded from the Internet or a key you exported from your own Registry. Normally, if you double-click on a .REG script, Windows will add the values in the script to your Registry. If you use Unregistry, you can load that same .REG script and it will remove the values specified in the script. Optionally, you can also have it delete empty keys that are emptied by Unregistry.
This can be used in a particularly powerful duo with RegFromApp. RegFromApp generates a .REG script from watching a particular process run. You can read more about it in another 404 Tech Support article.
You can visit the Google Code page for the project: http://code.google.com/p/unregistry/
Unfortunately there are no downloads listed on the Google Code page for Unregistry. I acquired the latest version of the code in the repository and checked it out. On my own machine, I compiled it into its executable. It seems to work well and is very stable. The screenshot above was made from my personal use of Unregistry.