Dave Hildebrand.com » registry

Remove a Windows Service

Dave — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:25:47 +0000

Last night I moved my PRTG virtual machine to my newly installed ESXi server. The move went well, but when I went to boot up the PRTG VM the service wouldn’t start. PRTG was nice enough to tell me that I had another copy of the service running on the network and even gave me the command to find the PC it was running on.

Turns out it was running on an old monitoring PC I had used years before that was still powered on. Since I still use it for a couple of other monitoring apps I couldn’t just turn it off. As a temp fix I stopped the service and set it to disabled. Now the PRTG VM started up and began collecting data once again.

As the PRTG uninstaller did not remove the PRTG service from the old monitoring PC I still needed a way to pitch it even though I had disabled it. A quick search turned up a couple of options, the easy way and the slightly more difficult way.

The Easy Way:

sc delete “service_name”

In my case the command was:
sc delete PRTGService

The Slightly More Difficult Way:

**Dislaimer: This process involves working in the Windows Registry. Before deleting any file please make a backup in case of borking your system.

Run Regedit

Find the registry entry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services”

Look for the service there and delete it.

More Registry Goodies

Dave — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:06:56 +0000

We are in the process of installing a policy and procedure management application at the hospital. It has been setup so that users are not required to enter their user name and password to access the site, it is done via LDAP. To get the single-sign-on benefits of the LDAP look ups we needed to add the domain name to the list of trusted sites in IE. This can be done via Group Policy, but, my experiences with this group policy setting has been mixed. Each time I configured this Group Policy Object setting it turned off the option for the user to add sites. Each new site needed to be added by me in to the GPO. While I limit what my users can change and access I do not like getting calls for simple stuff like this. What was I to do?

Desktop Authority and registry settings to the rescue.

I searched Google for the location of the registry key used to set the zones and came up with:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\thedomainname.com\thesubdomain

Type: RED_DWORD
Value: http
Data: 1

I added my required site as a DWORD value in to DA, which can been seen below:

I then applied this policy to my users and the next time they log in the setting will be applied for them.

Set the IE homepage via the registry

Dave — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:27:01 +0000

We just got in a batch of HP desktops and so far they look to be a good investment. There isn’t much crap/bloat ware installed on it, so we can get them out the door to our users quite quickly. We have had only 1 minor issue with them. For each new user who logs in, the system sets the IE homepage to an HP/AOL site, not our corporate intranet. Instead of emailing our users instructing them on how to set the homepage back to our intranet site I logged into our Desktop Authority server and added a new option under the registry settings.

They registry key to use is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“Start Page”=”http://www.howtogeek.com/”

Here is a screen cap of the DA settings I used:

After replicating this to our domain controllers each user who logs in will have their homepage set to http://sharepoint/.

NOTE: The above procedure was used because my GPO for setting the default homepage was not working on these HP desktops.