Anyone know of a windows xp registry editor where you can enter a key to search and it will find anything containing that term in the registry and delete it?
No, but you could take a look here:
Free Registry Tools - SnapFiles
I’ve heard messing around with the registry can be pretty dangerous for your system though. Then again, if I used them myself, I wouldn’t know what I was doing 
Messing around with your registry CAN be dangerous if you don’t know what your doing. From what I was reading, none of those programs will do what I want but thanks for trying
Well, it was worth a shot 
[QUOTE=StimpE]
Messing around with your registry CAN be dangerous if you don’t know what your doing. From what I was reading, none of those programs will do what I want but thanks for trying
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=StimpE]
… enter a key to search and it will find anything containing that term …
[/QUOTE]
I know it sound completely obvious but have you tried the ‘Find’ utlity in ‘regedit’?
Yes, but I want it to delete all the keys it finds. not just show me them one by one.
Delete them as you go 
[QUOTE=pelvis_3]
Delete them as you go
[/QUOTE]
Sorry but I don’t want to manually delete hundreds of lame registry entries.
I used to try and find registry keys left by shareware programs so I could use them after the trial period finished. I hardly met success though.
Incase you’re wondering why I need this, I’m trying to manually remove a program that failed through the add/remove programs by finding the keys it entered (theres LOTS, its a symantec product) and removing them.
I am not sure if you tried it but I remember, ages ago, using ‘Registry First-Aid’.
It was quite good at finding. Then you could just tick all the boxes and delete the lot.
Unfortunately it is not free…
I found it quite good.
Thanks, this will make jobs easier in the future 