after registry permissions reset: check group policy membership; it's probably wrong and may cause problems under group membership symptoms of a registry permissions problem: - works on first login, but not after reboot / second login (group policy objects in win7 apparently cached / not updated until after boot) to identify keys that are still locked with wrong permissions: try to apply some permission to all subkeys of the user key; stumbling blocks should cause "access denied" errors that identify the key. note that exporting the entire user registry as a text file does not work; locked keys are either ignored or exported anyway, silently.