Lotus 123 and Office 2003 Question

[Jack Gillis]

Years ago I used Lotus Smartsuite instead of Office under XP. I soon
switched to Office 97 and removed Smartsuite and all if its components
or so I thought. I recall running regedit after the switch and found
many references to Lotus 123 which I removed. Office 97 ran just fine
and so did the rest of the system. A few weeks ago I switched to Office
2003 and ran regedit again to make an unrelated change. Imagine my
surprise when I found, again, many references to Lotus 123.

I've no idea where they came from except perhaps from restoring a backup
from before doing the clean up of the registry but I feel that is
improbable. I wonder if the installation of 2003 might have put them in
the registry to provide some file conversion capability for Excel?

Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing is, if 2003 doesn't need them can
I again go through and remove those registry entries? They are of no
use to my system as far as I can see.

Thank you.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Frankly ... don't worry about it.

A "best practice" is to never use regedit unless you have very specific
and fully documented (by authorative source) of the change to make. The
registry used by all/most programs in their own ways--mostly not
documented or understood.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[joust in jest]

To expand on Rob's post:

While many Registry keys can be removed without consequence, the removal of
a SINGLE wrong key can render your computer unbootable. Remember the adage:
If it aint broke, don't break it.

steve