Please Help. Tried to take ownership of Registry Keys...

[TPStag]

So I bought a Microsoft Office 2007 key along with my HP Pavillion TX2510US last month, which had a trial version installed. At the end of the trial I tried to put in the product key and it wasn't working. I figure someone with a keygenerator must have used it already.

I went online to try and figure out what to do or how to contact microsoft about it. I stumbled onto a message board that said that I could somehow disable microsoft office from recognizing that I was running a trial version.

Anywho, I did everything fine until I ended up taking ownership of some registry folders. HKey_Local_Machine and HKey_Current_Users. Basically I right clicked on those folders, went to permission, added my username to give myself permission to alter files, and then went to the Owner tab and for some reason gave myself control over the subkeys.

Anywho - my laptop then started to loop-restart.

I would like to somehow undo what I did, so I booted in safe mode, and removed ownership from myself. It was still restarting. I then tried to do a system restore - restarted halfway through.

Finally in the morning I tried to do a system restore in safe mode and after about an hour and a half it restarted. The laptop has stopped restarting but it looks odd...almost like a permanent classic view.

I'm not sure that I've solved the problem, and I'm not sure what else could go wrong or how matters could degrade.

Can anyone help me figure out what I should do...? I really feel like I've gotten in way over my head, I'm utterly miserable about all of this, and I've got this huge feeling that I'm never going to attempt any of those tweaks or anything like that again.

Is there any way to solve or work towards a solution here? Any more information I could provide?

Thanks!

[TPStag]

I'm also running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit.

[Yogesh]

Playing with registry files often mess up the things. Even the slightest tweaks in registry that we feel normal can affect the computer working. In your case it is still better that your system is running fine after system restore.

Well I am a XP user. I dont know much about Vista. I tried to search for the solution but all I got was changing the regular view to classic but not classic to regular. It seems you are stuck here with this strange problem

[TPStag]

That's the thing though, as far as registry files go...I just took ownership for a an hour and then things got funny.

But yeah, I'm stuck in a classic view type setting, and I'm not sure if there are any other not readily apparent issues that are going on.

It's unsettling.