A very simple tactic I found after accidentally locking myself out of dos and regedit is to open notepad and type the following: REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows CurrentVersionPoliciesWinOldApp] "Disabled"=dword:0 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindows CurrentVersionPoliciesSystem] "DisableRegistryTools"=dword:0