Full Control Permission to Delete or Edit Restricted Windows Registry

Scenario : You are trying to clean your context menu as shown in my previous post. You are trying to remove some corrupted registry Entries. But are not able to. Whats with that ??

Solution : I faced this problem some days back. I was helping a friend troubleshoot some problems with his Context menu. For starters, Windows registry can be considered as a database that keeps settings for your Windows computer containing a lot of software, hardware and Windows user configurations settings.

As always, a word of caution : Editing Windows registry is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing because if you wrongly deleted an important key, your Windows computer might not boot up the next time. So always make a backup of the registry using the Export option.

OK Back to the topic, Like I was saying, I had problems deleting one of the registry key. Once I clicked on delete, I got an error popup telling me that “Cannot delete Key: Error while deleting key.“.

This error can happen only when you do not have adequate permissions. But my friends account was admin, how come he had such restrictions ?? Boy, did not see that one coming…. Windows is certainly Screwed up !!! 😛

We digress again, Now to solve this problem, we’ll have to edit the registry permissions to allow the logged on user full control on the subkeys. How ??  Simply follow the steps below to take full control of the restricted registry key.

Lets take an Example Key : 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System\Scripts

1. Open Run and type “Regedit” (minus the quotes).

2. Right click on the key that you want to take full control of and select Permissions…

3. Click the Advanced button.

4. Go on the Owner tab. Select your user name and check “Replace owner on subcontainers and objects” and click OK.

5. Now you should be back at the Permissions window again. Now Click on EVERYONE and check Full Control for Allow. Click OK.

Now you will be able to modify and\or delete that protected registry keys.