Ghosts in Toshiba registry

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

While troubleshooting a video playback issue on my wife's A45-S120 I
happened upon a video codec checker called "sherlock"

http://www.updatexp.com/sherlock-codec-detective.html

which told me that three MPEG encoder codecs were "broken"; i.e. they had
registry entries but no corresponding files. All of them were "Attila"
codecs and were supposed to be in the Program Files\Arcsoft\SHOWBIZ folder.
That folder doesn't exist ... and never has since the machine was first
booted. Neither has anyone installed or uninstalled Arcsoft SHOWBIZ.

My only conclusion was this registry garbage came pre-installed, courtesy
of Toshiba - perhaps as an aborted install, or not-cleanly-uninstalled
demo when the hard drive masters for this series was first imaged. Phooey.

I hear a lot of people say that they wipe all machines clean and do a
fresh install of the OS and things they need, rather than contend with
this type of trash collection ... am beginning to see the merit.