RegChk was written so I could find the 'junk' in the registry. After installing and uninstalling several hundred programs, I knew that there must be lots of stuff in the registry that pointed to files that moved or were no longer on the harddrive.
There are many utilities, many articles written, and many commercial products dedicated to removing a specific app from the registry. I could find nothing that took the registry point-of-view to tell you what was moved or gone from the harddrive.
Now something does.
What does it do?
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RegChk scans the registry for files and directories and checks to see if they exist. RegChk does NOTHING to the registry. It simply shells "regedit.exe /e regchk.txt" which exports everything from the registry to a text file. Even the text file is treated as read-only (now you have that all-important registry backup you've been meaning to do). A separate report is generated for each drive.
What info do I get?
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Each missing file is reported in regchk_*.out where * is the drive letter you checked. Each reported file has 3 lines of data similar to the following:
Line one is the actual filename or directory name that RegChk checked for existence. Failure to find it is what caused this report entry to be generated. It may find some 'funny' things, because filename parsing from the registry is not an exact science. I'm constantly adding filters to eliminate the 'funny' ones from the scan.
Line two is the key I found just before the file or directory. It MAY NOT BE THE EXACT KEY, but will be *very* close to the problem.
Line three is the raw data in which I found the filename. It's for reference in case the filename looks 'funny'
What do I do with it?
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You can use this information to edit your registry. THIS CAN BE A VERY DANGEROUS THING TO DO. If you're not comfortable in the registry, stay out, and just forget you ever saw this program. MISTAKES IN REGISTRY EDITS CAN EASILY DESTROY ALL THE DATA ON YOUR SYSTEM, AND PERHAPS ON OTHER SYSTEMS AS WELL. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
That said, use the information to delete data and keys for files and directories that no longer exist on your system. Use your own discretion in deleting references.
