I have a very stubborn registry key which is impossible to delete or access:
HKLM\Software\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection\CurrentVersion
. When I try to open it in regedit
, it says "An error is preventing this key from being opened. Details: The system cannot find the file specified."
When I try to delete the whole branch, all I get is "Error while deleting key"
.
Following some advice I found elsewhere, I tried downloading the RegDelNull utility from Sysinternals, but scanning the whole HKLM
tree did not reveal any items to delete. However, when I specified the entire path to the bad key, I got the following message:
"A null context handle was passed from the client to the host during a remote procedure call."
Why did regedit complain about being unable to find the file specified? Is it something related to the way registry entries are stored?
More importantly, how do I delete the keys when they cannot even be deleted by the utility made for precisely this purpose?