"Sticky" Win ME Registry Entry Won't Go Away

[fobotcso]

The Win ME Notebook wants to dial the web every time it boots up. It is trying to find the HP printer that it thinks is located outside the LAN.

I am trying to remove all mention of HP on the Notebook so as to start again with a "clean page". I can delete the offending Registry entry easily. But every time I reboot, the Registry entry is back and the Notebook dials up.

The culprit is "System.dat". This file can be "read" (sort of) in Notepad and it's full of references to Hewlett Packard. I can't find a way of purging the HP stuff from that file and I wouldn't dream of trying to edit it manually. That way lies a rebuild or at least a restore from backup using the EBD in which case the problem will not have gone away.

So, is there a Techie out there with an answer to this? Win ME and Win 98 are similar in the Registry setup so expertise in Win 98 will help.

Advice please.

[What_does_this_button_do?]

Have you tried the following?

Start
Settings
Printers
Right click your printer (not the HP) and
"Set as default"

[fobotcso]

Thanks, Buttons, but I have removed all printers from the obvious places on the notebook.

Where is does show up is in the "Network Neighbourhood" as an HP_Network_Printer and gives the static IP address that the Print Server has on my LAN. It doesn't show the actual printer that used to be on the Print Server, only the IP address of the Server itself.

I cannot delete this "printer".

[Edit 45 mins later]

Whoops! As I typed that last bit about not being able to delete the "printer" a penny dropped. Because the "printer" was there at shut down it would always be entered into the System.dat file as a device.

So I went into the registry again and found a sub-key called "Local search" in the Hewlett Packard Key tree. Changed the "1" to a "0" and now the notebook does not go looking for any printers by dialling up on boot.

It will still not allow me to delete the Hewlett Packard/Jet Admin set of keys as, if I do, the next time I boot it all reappears again and dials up. So I still need to purge the System.dat but at least the pesky auto-dial has stopped.

[ORAC]

Try RegClean (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,4143,00.asp)