misophist

There have been a number of Windows "Reg Clean" utilities. Easy Cleaner may (or not) be the one that Ziff Davis put out. They do have a decent (free) one, as I recall.

There's a possibility that something like this might be a help, since some of them can run through the registry and identify "dead calls" like the one that appears to be the problem here. It's not really certain though, that the "call" comes from the registry, and regedit can search there quite effectively if you have some clues, as here, to search for. The problem call may be in any .dll (or a couple of other file types) anywhere on the machine, rather than, or in addition to, in the registry.

In general, with the later versions of Windows, the "excessive use of utilities" tends to cause more problems than they solve. (This is likely because the people who use them are the same ones who try out all the "freeby" stuff they can get their hands on?) With Win2K or WinXP, you shouldn't need them, and it's almost impossible to be assured that a given one of them is certifiably "Windows Compatible." I tend to not use them, although I can't object to them in cases where there is a confirmed problem. I can't personally confirm that any such utility would be likely to find, or fix, "this particular" problem.

It probably wouldn't hurt to try it. I'm simply not sufficiently familiar with the particular utility to guess about how helpful it might be.

John