Inactive Display Entries in Registry (DxDiag & Win98SE)

[Floyd Walker]

Anyone know how to remove these (safely)?
When I ran a DxDiag while attempting to troubleshoot a game, I saw in the report generated that I had this:

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Inactive Display Entries in Registry
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 Card name: Standard Display Adapter (VGA)
    Driver: vga.drv
 Card name: RADEON 9500 PRO / 9700 - Secondary
    Driver: ATI2DRAG.DRV

I found 1 entry for "vga.drv" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Class/Display/0000/Default
but I found a lot for "ATI2DRAG.DRV"... I'm thinking, though, that the ones I need to be concerned about are somewhere under .../Class/Display/0001/Default or .../0002/Default. Decisions, decisions...

I also had a couple under sound, but I was able to find and remove those with no problem... the little "0" in their registry key values was a dead giveaway that they were inactive.

Since I have a 9500PRO currently installed, I'm more hesitant to remove any entries relating to it, but I'd also hate to remove anything essential to the functioning of the system. I guess that I've come to the direct Registry editing party just a little bit late.

Thanks in advance for any help

[egrudzin]

I don't think you want to be messing with the registry like that.  Whether something is inactive or not it may still need to be there at some point.  If the settings are inactive and don't do anything then there really is no harm in leaving them there.  If you accidentally delete something important you could completely break the video driver or worse yet cause Windows not to boot at all.

Your Radeon card is supposed to have that secondary display driver anyway.  My 9600XT shows a secondary as well and it has with every driver revision so you probably shouldn't mess with it.

What problem are you having with a game and what caused you to poke around in the registry to fix it?

[Floyd Walker]

Kind of what I thought would be the case. The Inactive sound drivers I removed were for a piece of hardware I changed last year, so I figured it was safe to remove -those- entries.
Anyway...
The game I'm trying to get to run is Shadow Ops: Red Mercury.  After trying all the usual steps to get it to NOT hard-lock with looping sound on the start screen, I figured that it was time to look for conflicts. When I ran dxdiag, it said, under the "input" tab, that there was an error in the registry. I saved the .txt and started looking through it - turned out the error was an easy fix, just had to put a value back in that had been deleted. I then saw the inactive list. Hmmm....
So that's how I came to wondering about how to get rid of the inactive stuff.
Thanks for letting me know it isn't anything to be concerned about.