HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet

My Vista Ultimate O.S. registry entries do not seem to be being managed automatically.

I have entries for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001 ... ControlSet070 and counting.

And the Select key is as follows:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select]
"Current"=dword:00000001 (1)
"Default"=dword:00000001 (1)
"Failed"=dword:00000000 (0)
"LastKnownGood"=dword:00000046 (70)

I would have only expected to have found a maximum of 4 ControlSet keys registered by Windows Vista, what is causing so many entries to be recorded ?

Why doesn't Vista clean up the old ControlSet entries ?

How can I fix this ?

Thanks in anticipation

Hello, and welcome to the Vista Forums!

Tricky question! You do have an awful lot. It is not exactly a bad thing, not that you ever said it was. Your Last Known Good Config is a high number, and that kind of suggests to me that Windows DOES think it is booting correctly, and evidently it is. [DEL]This can happen if you have a lot of changes.[/DEL] Badly described. Certain big registry changes will cause the old Control Set to be changed - sometimes. Big is really when certainly values and keys are modified. I guess that my first line of research would be to export the SYSTEM sub hive into a textural .reg file, just as you did for the Select key. We could then write a very short script to split it up into Control Sets (it would take me a shorter time to write the script than to do it manually) and then to compare them all using a log comparator. It would be interesting to see if there is one particular entry which is constantly changing.

It is difficult, and non-definitive, but you certainly know what you are doing. What do you think about this approach?

Thanks, and good luck!

Richard

Edited the above. Please refresh the page!

Hi niemiro
That sounds like a good plan. I think I can write a script to compare the control sets as you have suggested, great idea.

I'll see what it throws up and I'll post back my findings.

Cheers

Are you sure? I am happy to do it if you want, but you may of course do it yourself. As you can see, I don't really know what is going on, and this is just a test with a slight chance of success.

Many thanks for the offer, beyond the call of duty.

I think I have found the culprit, the majority of the ControlSetnnn entries just contain the "Services" sub-key. Only ControlSet001 and ControlSet070 contain all the main sub-keys (Control, Enum, Hardware Profiles & Services) which I believe would be expected since these two sets are current.

Under the Services sub-key, there is a value which is regularly changing from one set to the next, the key name is : buka_dump_prev and this registry key belongs to the "Trusteer Rapport" security software.

I have sent a problem report to Trusteer to ask if this is normal behaviour or maybe a bug with the software.

I'll update this thread when I have any more news.

Excellent! Slickly done!

Hello,

I am having exactly the same problem as described by BAAV1 on a Vista 64-bit.
There are already 114 ControlSets in the registry and it keeps creating new ones.

All sets only contain the Services branche, as stated by BAAV1.

I would be very interested in getting one of your scripts to be able to compare branches, I am not familiar with scripting.

Thank you very much in advance for your help.