June 24, 2006
Reader Rabbit and the Mystery of the 'Stuck Registry Value'
I have an extremely old copy of Reader Rabbit (Windows 95 Vintage). It has been installed and uninstalled more than one time on our Windows XP laptop. It's worthwhile to note that the computer the children use is littered with all sorts of programs.
Where adults tend to use a handful of programs often, children make a special point to load millions of programs and use them for 10 seconds.
So my little boy is now very interested in reading. I decided it was time to re-install Reader Rabbit.
I knew I was in trouble when I got the first error "unInstall unable to initialize. you may not be able to uninstall the program". I'm thinking - not the end of the world, and so I continue.
It goes through a lengthy install process and when it gets to the end, I see the dialog box "Creating Registry Entries", and then I get the dialog box, nicely named "SEVERE" with the text "Cannot create registry entry".
At this point, I try deleting everything I can find all over the computer and reinstall. Same thing.
Then I get into Regedit. I search for "Learning Company" (the maker) and lo and behold I get to a registry entry called "The Learning Company" and I cannot read it.
I can tell you with absolute certainty, that this is the problem.
Here is how you solve it. For some reason, this registry entry has NO permissions for any user. In fact, no users are even listed. But you cannot add users. What you MUST do first is to click on the owner tab. You will be tempted (and I acted on my temptation) to make the administrator the owner since my account was an administrator account. But do not be fooled. You are probably logged in as a normal user that just happens to be administrator. So you make your login the owner.
Next, you add yourself to the permissions and give yourself full control. Now when you do this, you'll find out that there is probably a ton of entries attached to this one. I was not able to change things like owner hierarchically, even though I could get close to what I needed by checking the children inheret the values check box. So I had to pretty much add myself as the owner and add myself to permissions.
After you do that, just delete the whole learning company registry tree - I assume this is the only Learning Company product you might have installed.
Then try to install. It worked flawlessly.
It only took me 2 hours. This is why I own a Mac. Really, with OS X, there is simply no comparison and I can never see Windows catching up - ever.
Where adults tend to use a handful of programs often, children make a special point to load millions of programs and use them for 10 seconds.
So my little boy is now very interested in reading. I decided it was time to re-install Reader Rabbit.
I knew I was in trouble when I got the first error "unInstall unable to initialize. you may not be able to uninstall the program". I'm thinking - not the end of the world, and so I continue.
It goes through a lengthy install process and when it gets to the end, I see the dialog box "Creating Registry Entries", and then I get the dialog box, nicely named "SEVERE" with the text "Cannot create registry entry".
At this point, I try deleting everything I can find all over the computer and reinstall. Same thing.
Then I get into Regedit. I search for "Learning Company" (the maker) and lo and behold I get to a registry entry called "The Learning Company" and I cannot read it.
I can tell you with absolute certainty, that this is the problem.
Here is how you solve it. For some reason, this registry entry has NO permissions for any user. In fact, no users are even listed. But you cannot add users. What you MUST do first is to click on the owner tab. You will be tempted (and I acted on my temptation) to make the administrator the owner since my account was an administrator account. But do not be fooled. You are probably logged in as a normal user that just happens to be administrator. So you make your login the owner.
Next, you add yourself to the permissions and give yourself full control. Now when you do this, you'll find out that there is probably a ton of entries attached to this one. I was not able to change things like owner hierarchically, even though I could get close to what I needed by checking the children inheret the values check box. So I had to pretty much add myself as the owner and add myself to permissions.
After you do that, just delete the whole learning company registry tree - I assume this is the only Learning Company product you might have installed.
Then try to install. It worked flawlessly.
It only took me 2 hours. This is why I own a Mac. Really, with OS X, there is simply no comparison and I can never see Windows catching up - ever.
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