Repairing an Application

Five ways to try and repair corrupt applications without reinstalling from scratch.

If the registry settings for an application become corrupt, there are several methods you can use to try and repair them. Here are some of these methods, in order of escalation. I'm assuming that the application was well-designed and comes with a Windows Installer package for installing the application on your system.

• Open the application, select Help from the menu, and click Detect and Repair.

• Open Control Panel, open Add Or Remove Programs, select the application, click Change, and follow the instructions presented to repair the application.

• Click Start, then Run, type msiexec /fu package or msiexec /fm package to repair either the per-user or per-computer settings as desired. Here package is the .msi file used to install the application. This method is great for administrators since you can repair apps remotely using this approach.

• regedit.exe and navigate to HKCU\Software\Company\Program\Version\

or

• HKLM\Software\Company\Program\Version\

and delete either the per-user or per-computer settings for the application (but back up the registry first!) and then restart the application. This is the method of next to last resort.

• Copy the registry keys for your application from another computer with similar configuration to your machine and on which the same version of the same application is installed. This is definitely the method of last resort, but it can work—sometimes!