Regedit - search causes computer slowness or freezing

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Are other people having a problem with regedit.exe when searching like the computer will slow down and completely freeze as even the date/clock in the system tray will stop while regedit is doing it's search. I remember on tenforums, people said this started with Windows 10 but Windows 7 and even XP is fine. Are there workarounds or options for searching the registry?

martyfelker · Oct 28, 2023

I respectfully disagree. Perhaps the cause for ;your experience of "slowness" is Windows itself. I have used Regrim Suite for more than a decade without any problems.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

martyfelker said:
I respectfully disagree. Perhaps the cause for ;your experience of "slowness" is Windows itself. I have used Regrim Suite for more than a decade without any problems.

Well, are you sure we are talking about the same thing? I am talking about using Regedit.exe which is part of Windows itself that has the issue as it was even heavily discussed on tenforums probably half a dozen years ago. You are talking about Regrim Suite which is not Regedit.exe as they are entirely two different things. It's obvious other registry editors do not have the problem so you can't disagree because you are talking two different things.

Kees · Oct 28, 2023

Normally I don't do many other things when I search the registry but specially for you I did such a search.
I searched the registry for "XXXX" and in the meantime I opened many different windows, like File Explorer, Firefox and many, many more.

No delay problems at all.

I did the search in the built-in registry editor (regedit.exe).

Try3 · Oct 28, 2023

Almighty1 said:
Are there workarounds or options for searching the registry?

Yes. You could use this tool for the job instead of RegEdit.
NirSoft RegScanner

I have never seen your symptoms even if I have used RegEdit to search.
I assume you have rebooted.
I assume you've run ChkDsk & Disk cleanup.
I assume you have no similar symptoms in other applications [or you would have said so].
I don't recall discussions of this subject in TenForums but, if you kept links to them, I suggest that you review those discussions again because whatever solution worked then for Win10 is likely to work now for Win11.

All the best,
Denis

Ghot · Oct 28, 2023

Almighty1 said:
Well, are you sure we are talking about the same thing? I am talking about using Regedit.exe which is part of Windows itself that has the issue as it was even heavily discussed on tenforums probably half a dozen years ago. You are talking about Regrim Suite which is not Regedit.exe as they are entirely two different things. It's obvious other registry editors do not have the problem so you can't disagree because you are talking two different things.

I just use Edit > Find ...and the F3 key to "find next", and I've had no problems with slow downs.
It could be from another cause, depending on what else you have running in the background... on your i7-8750H.

FreeBooter · Oct 28, 2023

Try deleting and rebuilding indexing from Indexing Options.

Berton · Oct 28, 2023

I did a clean install of Win11 on a 4-year-old HP Notebook yesterday and made 2 Registry changes, one to add in Copy to/Move to for File Explorer right-click menu and the other to maintain the Number Lock condition after rebooting [only for keyboards with the number pad], did not see anything unusual in operation of regedit.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Kees said:
Normally I don't do many other things when I search the registry but specially for you I did such a search.
I searched the registry for "XXXX" and in the meantime I opened many different windows, like File Explorer, Firefox and many, many more.

No delay problems at all.

I did the search in the built-in registry editor (regedit.exe).

It is not what is running in the background as it is related to this:

Searching through registry takes forever after November Windows 10 upd - Windows 10 Help Forums

Recently i've updated my Windows 10 Pro x64 with that big November update without any issues except that now searching through registry takes literall

www.tenforums.com

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Try3 said:
Yes. You could use this tool for the job instead of RegEdit.
NirSoft RegScanner

I have never seen your symptoms even if I have used RegEdit to search.
I assume you have rebooted.
I assume you've run ChkDsk & Disk cleanup.
I assume you have no similar symptoms in other applications [or you would have said so].
I don't recall discussions of this subject in TenForums but, if you kept links to them, I suggest that you review those discussions again because whatever solution worked then for Win10 is likely to work now for Win11.

All the best,
Denis

Yes, I actually posted about RegScanner in this thread:

Searching through registry takes forever after November Windows 10 upd - Windows 10 Help Forums

Recently i've updated my Windows 10 Pro x64 with that big November update without any issues except that now searching through registry takes literall

www.tenforums.com

It has nothing to do with rebooting because the problem happens even after I immediately reboot.
Well, the solution in Windows 10 was to use regedit from a earlier build of Windows 10 as I would assume they would have fixed it by now. I don't normally do searches in regedit. So it might also be the size of the registry or something else.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Ghot said:
I just use Edit > Find ...and the F3 key to "find next", and I've had no problems with slow downs.
It could be from another cause, depending on what else you have running in the background... on your i7-8750H.

Yes, hard to tell since the thing is this was a known issue with Windows 10 but I rarely do searches in regedit as it's the same issue as this:

Searching through registry takes forever after November Windows 10 upd - Windows 10 Help Forums

Recently i've updated my Windows 10 Pro x64 with that big November update without any issues except that now searching through registry takes literall

www.tenforums.com

So you could be right that it might be another cause but hard to troubleshoot because remember I can't exactly run something else to see what is happening like what the handles count is for example if the system is non-responsive. This is what I put in directly at the "Computer" section of RegEdit. If I did a search for "123", there is no problem because it will find something within 5 seconds but it's only when I am trying to find something like below which is when I have the symptoms and the mouse pointer also will be almost non-responsive.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

FreeBooter said:
Try deleting and rebuilding indexing from Indexing Options.

Giving that a shot now. Will report back if it makes a difference.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Berton said:
I did a clean install of Win11 on a 4-year-old HP Notebook yesterday and made 2 Registry changes, one to add in Copy to/Move to for File Explorer right-click menu and the other to maintain the Number Lock condition after rebooting [only for keyboards with the number pad], did not see anything unusual in operation of regedit.

Well, clean installs will have a smaller registry and edits are fine, it's only when searching in regedit there is a issue. I rarely do searches as I think the last time was actually in 2015.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

It's discussed heavily in this thread:

Registry Editor crashing - Windows 10 Help Forums

Hello, I hope I am posting in the appropriate section In the recent TP builds of Windows 10 Pro I am facing a weird problem with the Registry Editor i

www.tenforums.com

The issue is the registry key has to be over 255 characters in length which is what is causing the problem, atleast for those who had the problem.

Ghot · Oct 28, 2023

Almighty1 said:
only when I am trying to find something like below

I did a registry search for exactly that... took about 20 seconds total... didn't find anything.
All else, works at normal speed, during the search.

Did Task Manager have any weirdness to report during your search?

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Ghot said:
I did a registry search for exactly that... took about 20 seconds total... didn't find anything.
All else, works at normal speed, during the search.

Did Task Manager have any weirdness to report during your search?

It's not the search term but more the registry keys that causes regedit to loop as seen in the thread mentioned in post #14 so your registry has to have some long keys exceeding a x amount of characters before this will happen as certain conditions have to be met as some seem to have the issue and others don't. Task Manager or even System Informer formerly Process Hacker didn't show anything unusual about the regedit.exe process. The CPU and memory didn't go higher than before the search was started either. So not everyone will have the problem. I guess one way is to get regedit.exe from Windows 10 build 10240 and see if the same problem still exists as that was how people fixed it with Windows 10.

Almighty1 · Oct 28, 2023

Here is actually a link that mentions the problem...

Redirecting

Regedit - search causes computer slowness or freezing

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