Running Out Of Registry Space With Microsoft Windows 7 And ArcGIS 9.3.1 Or Other Programs

by Jithen (J) Singh

Earlier this week I decided install ArcGIS 9.3.1 on my HP Mini 5101 Netbook. My netbook is running Microsoft Windows 7 and I have to say the performance has been awesome so far. Things were working very well and yesterday afternoon I installed ArcGIS Server 9.3.1.

I can just imagine what you are thinking. Why am I installing ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 on a netbook? Well I am off to Redlands today and I didn’t want to lug around my powerful laptop. I needed something small that works. Funnily enough, ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 runs really well on this netbook.

Now that I had ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 running well on Windows 7 I needed to install a few other bits and pieces. Remember that ArcGIS 9.3.1 is now supported on Windows 7. You can find information here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/… I needed to install the SQL Server 2008 Native Client. I kicked off this install which takes literally a few seconds to complete, only to find it hang. I started to wonder what the problem was. I was receiving the following error:

Product: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable — Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly
‘Microsoft.VC80.OpenMP,type=”win32″,version=”8.0.50727.762″,
publicKeyToken=”1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b”,processorArchitecture=”x86″‘. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0x800736FD. assembly interface: IAssemblyCacheItem, function: Commit, component: {1E507087-0819-45E0-A01F-C8B3B9A1E18E}

This error message is not very descriptive so it made it hard to diagnose. Clicking OK started to do a roll back which then hung. This started to make me a bit worried. Looking the event logs I found that the Windows Modules Installer was trying to start and then failing. I thought something had become corrupted.

Whats worse? Programs stopped working and I couldn’t install any software. Hmm.

Doing some searching around I found out that the cause of this problem, based on the error message:

Windows could not start the Windows Modules Installer service on Local Computer.
Error 1450: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service.

Programs started to throw the following message:

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.

I think that message is pretty self explanatory. So it looks like installing ArcGIS 9.3.1, ArcGIS Server 9.3.1, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008, Microsoft Office 2007, and all the other bits and pieces has caused my registry to fill up!

So how does one increase the registry size? Well further digging found that you can set the registry limit in the registry! Heres hows:

Start regedit.exe

Browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet. Find Control and click on this. You should see a key called RegistrySizeLimit. This is where we need to increase it.

The default value is: 5d00000 which is 97517568. Screenshot below:

We need to change this value to: ffffffff which is: 4294967295. Screenshot below:

Once we have done this, restart the machine and this should fix the problem.

Start with installing bits of software again and see how you get on. You might have to reinstall some software if the registry entries for these have become corrupted. Depending on the software, you might be able to do a repair if it supports this.

So a very interesting and annoying problem that took a few hours to figure out but once you know about it you know how to tackle it in the future. Hope this helps.