registry filled rubbish - only avast entries

I received this error

"Windows- Low On Registry Space

The system has reached the maximum size allowed for the system part of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored."

and after a little research, tried uninstalling the nvidia card drivers and rebuilding the paging file. Worked for one reboot then it came back again.

Looking thru the registry at random, I thought I’d check the entries for avast! and found the each of the avast! services entries filled with the following (see attachment or below)*

*p.s. this is a small sample that was left after uninstalling avast; there was much much more than this before.

Reinstalling now and will perform a boot scan but thought this was very weird!

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&']

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'(]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aswFsBlk\$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+,-./0123$%&'()*+]

Have you windows xp?
Have you installed service pack 3 with avast active?

Yes, SP3 installed May last year. I don’t recall whether avast was active or not.

This is the same story.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/symantec-blames-microsoft-xp-sp3-registry-corruption-683

It is indeed the SP installer going haywire (for unknown reasons)

Thanks
Vlk

It seems that the solution was uninstall the security software before installing SP3…

Uninstalled, then ran the avast uninstaller which removed the last of the registry entries and re-installed.

No ‘Low memory’ pop ups as yet, hope that’s it.

I am here to help! ;D