Cleaning Up The Registry After Uninstalled A Program

I just uninstalled a program from my computer which I will probably reinstall once I am finished with this uninstallation process.

The program that I uninstalled was Opera web browser and the reason that I am trying to uninstall/ reinstall is that it wasn't saving my usernames and passwords.

I first backed up my registry and now I am trying to delete the needful in the registry.
when I search "opera" in regedit some things that I am finding are obviously connected to the opera program. However, some things I am not so sure about.

For example, a file in HK_classes_root
name: (default)
type: REG_SZ
data: ProvOperationsCleanContext

For these files that I am more unsure about, is it a good plan to just leave them?

There is always the plan of reverting to the backup but I just wonder, if I do something wrong, how fast problems will show up. Because if you don't notice problems for a month, let's say, I can see the being problematic.

 

ProvOperationsCleanContext <- note that the capitalisation of that entry doesn't fit with a program called Opera, so it's very unlikely to be referring to the web browser. Whatever that entry refers to, I don't have it here and I have Opera 50.0.2762.45 (PGO) Stable currently installed.

If in doubt, don't touch a Registry entry.

 

thanks, I didn't even see the word opera in there.

 

Searching the registry with the inbuilt function is dangerous at best.

I use EssentialPIM and as a test I searched for pim.
The second instance was this.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mapimail
Delete this and you can say goodbye to email on your PC.

Good advice.

 

Wow, there are a lot of registry entries with the characters opera. If you ever write that needs to install itself, might not be a bad idea to see how much instances of those characters are already in the Windows registry.

 

When I was editing the registry I found a folder that I thought I should delete.
The location of the folder was
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RADAR\HeapLeakDetection\DiagnosedApplications\opera.exe
When I pressed delete, nothing happened. So, I pressed it again. After that, I notice that the folder that was was trying to delete was indeed deleted. However, I am concerned that something else got deleted, too (I'm not sure). As an aside, the registry editor had been a little laggy which I forgot at the time but in hindsight I should have been more patient after pressing delete. An example of it being laggy before this is that when I would select the file or edit menu (the file menu for the regedit application), the menu would first appear blank and then after a couple of seconds populate the options.

Because of having possibly having deleted a folder that I didn't want to delete, I decided to restore the registry using the backup that I made before. So, I double clicked on the backed up registry file and for a while it didn't give any feedback. Then eventually, I saw that the opera.exe folder was restored (and if there as another file that I had accidentally deleted, that might have been restored, too). But, I also got an error message, some kind of write error. I thought this might be because I had regedit opened at the same time that I was trying to restore the backup. So, I decided to close the reboot and then try again without having regedit opened. I did that but I got the same error message again.

I then searched around the web for an answer but a couple of paths led to dead ends.
One of the pages that I found was helping someone with windows 8.1 and another was using the automatic registry backup that Windows creates.

One thing that's interesting about this whole experience is that given the number of results for opera that you find when searching the registry, it might be easier to restore to a recent disk image backup instead of editing the registry manually. But, it's good that I am going to learn a little bit here by the endeavor of editing the registry.

 

Edit of last post:
I wanted to add that when I backed up the registry, I backed up the whole thing (all of the hives, all into one file)

Also, new news:
Windows thinks it's not activated.