The other day while working on some Windows USB drivers, it was required that some entries in the registry be deleted. The goal was to remove the entries to re-establish a "virgin" system for testing. The registry entries were owned by the "System" so launching regedit with elevated [Admin] privileges didn't help when trying to delete the items. It was also a lost cause (and a waste of about 30 minutes) trying to play around with the entry's ownership. Right-clicking on the entry and trying to delete only resulted in the annoying dialog box below.

The magic trick needed to delete the pesky registry entries is to use the Psexec which can be downloaded from Microsoft. You can read the manual page and more about the tools from here, but basically it's used in our case to launch regedit as the SYSTEM user. Before using, you'll want to extract the download archive and add an entry in your environment variables to point to the EXE. To finally get rid of those pesky registry entires, simply start a command shell as Admin and run the command below:

'psexec -s -i regedit'

Now you can navigate to any registry entry, right click, and edit or delete as desired. Begone unwanted registry entries for good.

P.S. Needless to say you should know what you're doing when working with regedit, have backups, not call us when you accidentally trash you system, etc., etc., etc.