Can't delete registry key though I changed ownership to myself

Question

I want to completely remove office from registry (under windows 8 32 bits).

But I can't remove a key under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\...\OFFICE\Common\Smart Tag\Actions\{...}

Though I changed ownership to myself with full control (I use regedit with admin rights of course).

Why ? How to delete this key ?

Answer 1

Use RegOwnershipEx to take ownership of registry keys:

RegOwnershipEx is an application which allows you to do the following tasks:

• you will be able to take ownership of a registry key with one click (useful to get the full access to the key).
• you will be able to jump directly to desired registry also with one click.

Now try again to delete the keys.

Answer 2

A process may have the key open.

Sysinternal's Process Explorer may be able to help you find and kill the process. Try killing all explorer.exe's and iexplore.exe's (while regedit is open) and then see if the key can be deleted.

You may need to load the key offline from a Windows PE boot disk if nothing else works. Load the SOFTWARE hive from c:\windows\system32\config.