Corrupt Registry

[wezman2k]

ok so i got this email...with an application attached to it
i decided i would at least take a look and as soon as i opened it i knew it was "malicious"...it said "permanently delete registry key?" and i MEANT to select NO (yes, i know i should have just closed it) but i accidentally clicked yes....so after i accidentally bumped yes on the keyboard it deleted the key and i just got off to eat....so when i'm done eating (about 10-15 mins) i get back on, restart, and everything is screwed up. none of my desktop icons will open, i can't run system recovery (where you can bring your comp back to a specific date) ink at theend of them, special effects and fade settings are turned back on etc...now i'm 99.999999% sure it was the mystery key that made all of this happen. now my question here is this: if i run system recovery (the safe one that basically just reinstalls winxp), should everything be back to normal (except for the other programs like aol and junk that will probably be added again)?

 

[j79zlr]

A repair install should get you back up and running, all of you data should be intact, so then I would repair install, backup what you need, then reformat and reinstall. Its impossible to tell what that script did unless you have a copy of it.

 

[wezman2k]

ok i did the repair install and everything is fine...but i lost a TON of hard drive space...i've tried disk cleanup and it's not going to free up more than 5 megs here.... i lost maybe 20 gigabytes...is there ANY way to do this without reformatting????!!!

 

[mike09]

im sorry dude there probably isnt. i would back up what you need then reinstall. almost the same thing happened to me on sunday.

 

[Bronx Bomber]

yea, backup the bare necessities and reformat. but then again, sometimes the stuff you backup is infected, and that will just spread to your newly reformated hard drive.

 

[wezman2k]

no, nothing is infected, some ******* just wrote a program that deletes a necessary registry key...this reeeally sucks...

 

[Bronx Bomber]

yea, that does sound like it sucks.