Uhm, not sure if this is helpful, but Hiren's Boot CD used to have several utilities to fix Windows.
Perhaps one of them can help you to reset or fix the registry.
Again, it's just and idea and because nobody else replied, I thought I should mention this. 😀

the main page for soft15khz and the documentation and downloads all appear to be down.

At least I can help you with that to some extent...
As long as you have the original link, you can paste it in the Wayback Machine at archive.org and some of the older pages are there. I didn't find any archive links newer than 2008 that worked though.

FAQ

Screenshots and Downloads

Windows and the Drivers
(this is in German -- copy/paste into translate.google.com if you don't know German)

Basic Formulas to calculate Resolutions
(also in German)

Tested cards

RGB vs SCART

Thanks, i will have a look at the registry tools.

Thing is, i'm not really sure if the problem isn't worse than that - I tried deleting the registry entries (that i had restored from the backup) completely, in the hope that windows would then default to some standard settings but it still wouldn't boot.

I tried a windows repair but it got to the end and then said "Setup cannot set the required windows xp configuration information. This indicates an internal setup error."

I don't want to try fixboot or fixmbr because i think that may break everything as i have grub and linux on there anyway and from what i remember windows doesn't like that, and i don't want to lose access to the drives.

I guess i really need to find where people still talk about this software - the german site seems pretty dead and the arcade controls one seems to have some kind of elitist "you are not allowed to register" thing going on.

Thanks for the archive links - I thought I had tried that myself and got "robots txt" responces but maybe i was confusing it with another site.
Also you doing that made me realise that those pages aren't actually down - they have just migrated the forum and the links have changed - remove the "community" prefix and the "=t" part and they work.

Thanks

At this point I would be concerned that the Kaspersky editor may have caused some inadvertent damage. I doubt there's anything that can be done anymore.

Fixboot and fixmbr almost certainly won't do any good.

Thanks, i have half repaired it, thanks for the ideas.

Looking at regedit in the mini xp part of hiren's boot cd made me realise that there are meant to be loads of keys in

1HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\currentcontrolset\control

where as when kaspersky boot disc had done the .reg file import, for some strange reason, it had decided to delete all keys and values other than the ones it was importing. Wtf.

All i was left with was

1HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\currentcontrolset\control\Video

So luckily, the registry for the system that I don't really use has a backup from just before installed soft15khz so i just restored that.
I used one of the tools in hiren's boot cd for that - think it might be registry restore wizard or something - i can't remember.

So now i need to either try and manually export all the extra keys from this windows install to the other install, or restore the really old backup of the other install which was from system initial installation.

What registry editor would people recommend so that i can compare the two? I am hoping these are the kind of values that don't really change that much anyway so i can just move them from one install to the next.

Also, in the hiren's boot cd, for some reason, loading hives is greyed out - why is this? Or do you have to unload the registry of the boot cd first?
I am guessing importing just imports .reg files or hive files into the registry, which isn't very useful if you don't know what is in a hive or where it should be imported as then you could really break things.
At least with .regs you don't have that issue (unless using the stupid kaspersky one it seems!).

So the standard windows regedit really seems really unfit for purpose!

Though to be honest, i feel the registry itself is an extremely stupid idea and it would be far better for programs to store their configoration information in their own directories. But that might be my ignorance speaking 😉

So, looks like i might be able to actually fix it if i can find a decent registry comparitor. (I assume the hives in the "repair" folder of the windows directory are the ones from the original clean install backup windows does?).

Any ideeas?

Thanks for your help!

Okay i fixed it!

Turns out it wasn't actually the fault of the Kaspersky registry editor but rather from WHERE i was editing the registry.

From reading online, i found that currentcontrolset is only created by windows while the operating system is being run - otherwise it doesn't exit.
Yet, the backup .reg files were editing values in currentcontrol set, where as really, it would have been better for them to look inside the appropriate control set that windows uses. You can find out which this is by looking at system\select . It is usually controlset001.

So I think it wasn't booting because currentcontrolset isn't meant to exist as a key - so i exported the video values in currentcontrolset to a reg file, then deleted the whole currentcontrolset branch (of the non-running windows installation) and then edited the .reg file so that instead of adding them to currentcontrolset it added them to controlset001. Then i ran the reg file to restore the old backed-up settings for that card.

So basically, you can only restore the .reg files for soft15khz when running the windows installation you wish to fix. Otherwise you need to edit the .reg files accordingly.
I would have hoped they would have put something about this in their faq but hopefully if other people have this issue they can find this topic.

Hope this helps someone.

Thanks!

Still though, if anyone knows of a better registry editor, let me know.