Windows 10: Strange symbols found in Registry Editor

I wasn't sure which place to put it in, so I put it in General Support.

I was about to find out why my Desktop Wallpaper's not changing - again - and when I went into Reg Edit, I saw this:

Does anyone know what this could mean?





:)

 

japanese/strange characters in registry?

I also have the strange objects in my registry. Unlike the other poster (vault2008), I have had issues. My computer shuts down and reboots. This has happened around 10 times over the last couple of weeks. I was wondering if it might be related to the
weird symbols.

My friend looked at his Win10 registry on two computers; there were NO strange objects. I don't know how long they have been in mine. I uninstalled Nero and checked the registry to delete Nero there before installing. That's when I noticed the symbols.
(Yesterday)

I'm thinking about setting a restore point and deleting the symbols.

Comments?

 

japanese/strange characters in registry?

I had been following another post on the shut down and reboot issue and have the problem myself as well. Does your pc have AMD graphics by any chance?

 

According to some ancient and possibly irrelevant posts, this kind of thing can happen for a variety of reasons that ranges from bugs in the certificate manager (wrong hive for that, though) to malware. Veteran TenForums poster ztruker posted back in 2009 about this kind of thing for Sevenforums. There's a relatively current thread on this at social.technet.microsoft.com that attributes such keys to "badly-behaved applications," too. Whatever it is, it's probably not good news, though. Hope you get it figured out!
--Ed--

 

Well I've recently installed a program called Who Is On My Wifi - after seeing a car suspiciously parked outside our house with its engine on (but parked about 1/2 a meter away from the curb) with 2 lads in there looking at their machines (didn't have a good look what they were doing); I live at the end of a Lane which leads into some woods.

After I'd turned my router off they drove away.

So I installed that in case they came back again. So I was wondering if that might be the cause of it?

 

The social.technet item explains how to match up Registry Keys with SIDs (unique IDs) which may be used to tie them to resources, including applications. You could read that item and see if it provides some useful information to check the SIDs on the offending items.
HTH,
--Ed--

 

I don't see how I can do the 'wmic useraccount get name' when the "name" of it is "�؏�؏ᡗ
E", but other than that, I hardly have a clue what that person is on about, sorry.

I'm considering doing another System Restore or a Repair Install instead :/

 

Also, if there are bad sectors on your HDD and some files are corrupt, it will come out like this.
Press the Win key+X and choose Command Prompt (Admin) here type
chkdsk /R and press enter. Now type a Y for Yes and restart your computer. Check Disk will start at next bootup and it will take a while.

 

I can pile on that it's a HD corruption issue, I had a pen drive recently checked out, I was using as a permanently attached one out of sight for critical backups, in any case I looked at it, one directory inside it had hundreds of scrambled nonsense for directories.

In the registry.... YIKES, that's an immediate backup and wipe and drop fresh OS for me.

The guys outside wise, might be coincidence, but....
Change your WI-FI password and limit the bandwidth and # of devices it can use, if those settings are available in your router config, plus decrease the power % output (range) if it doesn't affect your use in the house?

Unfortunately it's easy to hack a wi-fi password, and no I am not providing details.

 

You can cut'n'paste even weird characters from regedit.exe into the command prompt or PowerShell windows. But you can get the SID information directly from regedit, simply by right-clicking the questionable entries. Having now pondered the suggestion of disk corruption as a contributing factor, though, that could indeed be involved. Have you run chkdsk on your system drive? It's a pretty good telltale when it comes to detecting file-level disk corruption.
HTH,
--Ed--

 

I tried running a chkdsk /R, but it got stuck at around 16% and never got any further than that (how many hours would I have to wait if it's just that it needs a long time to scan?). I've started getting BSOD's now - which I've created a thread about here: Starting with BSOD after noticing strange symbols in registry - Windows 10 Forums

 

Chkdsk takes as long as it needs. With /R you are re-checking bad blocks. If there are a significant number and it's a 1TB drive it can be as long as 24 hours. I speak from experience, having dropped a 'live' 1TB external HDD - the loud 'ting' as the heads hit the platter meant I had created some bad blocks of my own *Sad

 

Mine's only a 400GB HDD anyway (though I have an external HDD if it checks that as well). I'll just have to leave it on [from the morning] all day (too noisy at night in my bedroom for me to sleep with it on)

 

When troubleshooting problems, not just with computers, and there are multiple symptoms you need to decide which one is most significant. Unfortunately this isn't always easy. The most obvious symptom may not be the most important. While the Regedit issue is interesting I don't think that is the one that should be investigated at this time.

Signs at this time raise the possibility of disk corruption, possibly due to a physical problem. This is one of the most significant problems you can have in a computer because it can cause a wide variety of symptoms and has such serious implications. They must always be taken seriously and investigated.

As chkdsk has already been running for some time it would seem best to let it run to completion or it appears clear that it isn't going to. Only if this shows no problems should other possibilities be considered. And if the drive is bad and needs to be replaced everything else would be academic. You would need to restore the OS from a previously created backup or reinstall the OS.

 

If you typed chkdsk /R from the C:\> prompt, then it will only check the C: Drive. The foreign characters are from Drive Corruption
If Check Disk takes a long time and is stuck on on area (ie) 16%, that is a great indication that there are bad sectors or blocks in this area. Check Disk is trying to move the data in this area to an area near by with good sectors and mark the other sectors as Bad so Windows won't store data on them again. If you have Too many bad sectors, Check Disk will fail. If Check Disk takes overnight or longer, then it is a good indication that this drive is on the road to failing. Backup any data you want to keep to another drive and replace this drive ASAP.