I suspect you have bigger fish to fry than anything a registry cleaner
may have done. Which one did you use? Just curious, no big deal.

Yes, it's probably fastest and easiest to backup your personal data and
reinstall XP. If you had a good backup strategy in place, that'd be all
you needed to recover from this. Perhaps you should make it a priority
once you're back up and running.

A couple inline comments for you:

"TMCVIII" wrote in message
...
Now I'm having problems. For one, I can't install the Windows update
"Security Update for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (KB970892).

I Googled the error message but my machine doesn't have any SQL
servers inactive.

If you aren't using an SQL Server per the KB, then of course the update
won't install since there's nothing to set to "inactive". Here are a
couple links that might help explain some things for you:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970892
and
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...8-1c4fcd796050
You might have to copy/paste that last link if it line wrapped on you
incorrectly.

As for having "foolishly ... ", think nothing of it. In truth you're
simply on a learning curve and occasions like this are great excuses for
learning if you wish to accept the challenge. This one might be a
little drastic to learn from, but in the future ... . Everyone has to
go through something like it, so you're doing fine if this is the worst
that's happened to you so farG.

I'm one-cut above neophyte.

I've tried to use System Restore, but my machine won't allow me to do
that.

That sort of sounds like you may have been infected by a virus, trojan,
worm, some kind of malware or even just plain old file corruption; many
of the malwares will kill off your restore points and even some
legitimate programs will do that too, especially third party backup
programs.


Shall I reinstall Windows XP Home Edition on top of what I have to fix
the registry?

That's probably your fastest route to get back up and running.
-- Have you run chkdsk on your C boot drive?
-- How about the Event Viewer? Often you'll find hints there about what
might be wrong.
-- A firewall, Antivirus and antispyware programs are a necessity to
remain reasonably protected; I assume you are running those and have
checked for malware with them?

HTH,

Twayne`




Your thoughts are appreciated.

Tom