After installing Win 7 Ultimate on a machine with XP SP3 already installed on another partition I have a weird problem with my XP registry. The following run key for all accounts which are admin members keeps being deleted and recreated on every boot. Any changes will hold only for one reboot. For example if I add a reg string to start a program it will work for the next reboot but when I examine the key it will be missing. Any other changes to the key that I have made like ownership and permissions will also be gone;changed back to their default. I discovered this because certain programs I have installed to run on startup were not starting. This is the only run key effected. Run keys in HKLM are not affected. Even the runonce key works correctly in HKEY_USERS. HKEY_USERS\SID account number(member of admins)\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run I tried repairing XP (with XP cd) to no avail.Anyone else had this problem? In the past I had another similar strange effect on a another machine after creating multiboot with xp and server 2003. Some of my graphics card settings stopped working correctly even after driver reinstall and OS repair. My work around is to start everything in HKLM run key. Both the registries in my two other XP SP3 machines work fine. However they are not multiboot.
Hmmm...something sounds fishy there. Have you tried scanning your PC for viruses, and if yes, do you have a good reliable virus scanner? If the Run under the HKLM key works then I would just use that I guess. I have never heard of a problem like this that did not involve a virus/malware of some sort...seems highly unlikely that simply installing Windows 7 on another partition would affect XP like this...unless there is something I have missed. I ran XP multiboot with Win7 for a week and everything was fine. I just had no reason to keep XP since everything I need works fine in Win7...so I deleted it. That is a very strange problem you have there. Any more info you could share with us to shed more light on the situation perhaps?
No Viruses. Use NOD32, Hijackthis ,processexplorer(sysinternals), spybot. Scanned in safemode. No other strange behaviour. No strange internet traffic. Orig Win 7 iso checks out for viruses and MD5. I'm 100% sure no viruses on system. I get payed from time to time to remove viruses so I know what I'm doing having removed many nasty difficult to detect viruses (rootkits). Thanks for suggestion though. I have 3 HDDs which I had partitioned to install several OSs.Disk 1 had XP on the 1st primary and I was installing Win 7 on the 3rd pre-NTFS formatted primary of Disk 1. Disk 0 had 1 unformatted primary partition, 2 formatted primary partitions and an extended partition. All disks were MBR disks. Win7 put all the boot info on the 1st primary of disk 0. This may be where something went wrong. Later I realized this and swapped the drives around reinstalled Win 7 again after deleting and creating the partitions win 7 had installed to. I think the problem is caused by a quirk of windows. My accidental install and hardware setting it off. Yes I admit it is highly unusual but we are talking about Windows and I have seen some strange things before. I suppose my best solution is to wipe xp and do a clean install which I don't really want to do (time involved putting programs and setting back on). But I suppose I have no choice.