?? about editing registry

While searching thru the registry trying to fix a microsoft install prob, I found an old entry for go-zilla (!!!!!) and its cohorts. Honest, my co-worker talked me into downloading it in the early days of my computer experience.

What I need to know is can I delete that key (which I found at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT subfolder applications) and will that delete this offending crap from my computer? Or is there somewhere further back that I have to go to get rid of this stuff? Obviously, I am newbie.

I downloaded easycleaner last week but it kept freezing when it came time to delete registry items, and I found it too intimidating. I would just like to delete the items I can recognize. And besides, easycleaner did not show me the gozilla keys when I ran the program, and I had downloaded a registry cleaner specifically because I saw the gozilla in my registry, and I like the undo feature. I uninstalled easy cleaner, and then installed Tweak now which also has not recognized the gozilla. I also found several other keys to progs I had deleted or uninstalled long ago.

Is it safe to delete from the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\applications? And where do keys go after deletion?

Is there a website I can go to for some good info on editing the registry or is someone here able to help me out with getting rid of this stuff?

Thanks,
Mae

 

i believe gozilla is an adware program. rather than going about it manually (which could literally take hours to clean a whole system) there are convenient Adware and Spyware removal tools.

its the general consensus on this board to use two programs for this duty:

Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition

and Spybot Search & Destroy

keeping their definitions updated, running these programs once every few weeks goes a long way towards keeping your computer clean and quick.

 

Thank you IYTC,

I have run the scans, several of them in fact, lately. As well as all the other recommendations listed in the virus/spyware section. I have logs from HiJackThis as well, and none of them list these offending registry keys. Which is why I want to know the correct way to delete the keys manually...to make sure they don't come back. Just looking for some confirmation that this is the correct way to delete them.
Mae

 

Did you uninstall Gozilla (that was the first download utility I ever used and it was great in it's early days on my old Win98 system) with Add/Remove programs or is GoZilla still installed? If it is, then you should use GoZilla's own uninstaller or Windows Add/Remove programs to zap it before editing your registry.

I'm guess you did uninstall GoZilla properly and that's why you're upset at finding some remnants of it in your registry. It's unfortunate, but many programs leave traces behind in the registry even when they're uninstalled properly with Add/Remove programs.

You do have to be careful about editing the registry. Whether you use Windows own registry editing tool (select "Run" from the Start Button and then type in "regedit" -- without the quotes) or a 3rd party utility you should always make a backup copy of the registry before you change anything to insure you can restore the backup to put everything as it was in case your editing creates problems.

You can backup the registry within the Windows registry editing tool described above by choosing "Export" from the File drop down menu at the top left of the Registry Editor Window. I suggest creating a "RegistryBackups" folder in My Documents and subfolders for each Registry backup you do -- name them by date of backup so you can easily tell which is the most recent -- e.g RegBackup021205 or something similar. Then if you need to restore a registry backup you can use the "Import" option from the same drop down File menu in the Windows Registry Editor to load in a saved copy of the registry.

I think the WinXP System Restore utility also backs up your current registry along with other critical Windows files/settings if you know how to use that to save and restore backup points.

Once you've saved a backup copy of the registry you still need to be careful as you can make your system unbootable if you modify the wrong stuff in the registry. You can, in theory, still restore a backup copy of the registry even if you can't boot up to the Windows desktop but you might have to do it by using a bootable floopy and then work from a command line to restore the registry which can be difficult if you don't have any experience doing that. Fortunately GoZilla is such an unusual name that you're not likely to mistake some vital Windows registry entry as something left behind after you uninstalled GoZilla so you should be able to delete the old GoZilla entries without causing a problem, but....

The other poster made some good points -- you want to be sure you've done all the cleaning you can with some good anti-spyware tools first as some spyware gets it's hooks into key windows files/data so deeply that if you just yank it out by brute force (e.g. by registry editing) you can cripple some features of Windows. I did that once myself and found I was unable to dialup to the internet so I had to restore a "contaminated" file I'd deleted manually until I found the proper cleaner that did the job right. In that case the "contaminated" file had modified my winsock32 so that once I deleted the offending file winsock didn't work anymore. Once I found the proper cleaning/restore utility it was able to remove the offending file and restore winsock so it worked properly again.

I believe later versions of GoZilla did include some spyware features but it sounds like you may have had one of the earliest free versions of GoZilla that, while they did show ads when you ran the program, didn't include any other features of what has come to be known as spyware. In that case it's likely that you can edit the GoZilla registry entries you found without causing any problems, particularly if the anti-spyware programs you've run don't detect any GoZilla related spyware. Ad-Aware and Spybot are both very good anti-spyware tools and there are free versions of both programs available for download that work quite well.

The main thing is, if you do decide to edit your registry, whether with Windows regedit tool or a 3rd party utility, do make a backup copy of your registry first that you can locate easily and restore if you need to.

Hope this helps. Good luck!