advocat3

i did that and now i get a permission error inside of steam lotekguru. interestingly as well i now cannot get sound in any application i run and i can't even open audio files anymore. i click play and no sound comes out.

the steam error is:
steam://run/5051
Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access them.

the current owner of Steam in regedit is my username. i also cannot access of any of sub registrys values of steam, only the main steam key with the default and url protocol entries.

lonnyrjones, i would do that except that now that i don't have sound it doesn't really matter anymore. if i can't fix this registry crap then i'm just going to reformat back to XP. also, the steam entry had no owner. i also have restore points disabled because the information they write to the harddisk can't be defragmented and that annoys me so i disabled it. it has also been unable to fix any of my problem in the past so that was the biggest reason why i don't use system restore.

this may or may not be relevant either but i just changed the owner of the sub-steam entries to myself and can now access them but the steam problem is not fixed. i have not restarted my computer yet though nor have i attempted to append the registry like the steam support said. right now i'm just copying files to my spare HD in preparation of a reformat just in case. also, my computer restarted instantly when i clicked the advanced tab the first time to change the permissions for the sub-steam keys.