[RESOLVED] Regedit has caused an error in <unknown>

It would be best to run it overnight. Sometimes, the errors show up after a long time of running it.

Arrrgrhgrhrgrhrhrghr.

Booted to Win98SE DOS prompt ran scandisk with the change Train suggested on the drives that have shown the 'weird' corruption syptoms and all passed.

Booted WinMe and went fire up Everest to see HD temps and got Everest has caused an error in everest.bin blah blah.

Went to start up Firefox and it wouldn't start, like it was not installed.

Ran scandisk and went to open the log and it tried to open it in Wordpad - previously .log files were associated with notepad - but got Wordpad has caused an error in unknown

So this now makes me think that it's memory as suggested or the Ultra ATA controller or the mobo finally giving up the ghost.

I'm about 50% of the way to convincing my wife that we need to buy a new PC so........will run a memory checker overnight in the mean time.

That sounds like it dropping things and not putting them on the hdd.
Run the hdd diagnostic test also.
Your right, the mobo controllers can act up the same way.

Ran Memtest for 12 hours lastnight and it didn't pick up a thing.

Could try for longer but I'm inclined to think it's not a memory issue.

Last lot of 'corruption' occurred after running thorough scandisk - ie reading and rewriting to disk.

Previous lot of 'corruption; occurred after running defrag - ie reading and rewriting to disk.

I'm now trying to think if all the 'corruptions' that have occured and even though they are on different logical drives (partitions) I believe they are all on the same physical drive.

So testing the drive will be next including making sure it's all connected properly.