I boot Windows XP with the /3GB option in order to accomodate a very memory
hungry game. I upgraded that computer to SP3 tonight, and upon rebooting
I get an ugly message that the portion of the registry that can be used for
the system (OS) has been exhausted and no further information will be
stored. Since this was right after an SP3 upgrade, that already leaves me
with a bad feeling that SP3 installed completely.

I researched this online and sure enough when you boot with the /3GB option
they limit the system portion of the registry to only 12 MB. I went ahead
and set the RegistrySizeLimit attribute in the registry to 0xFFFFFFFF which
allows it to grow to 80% of the maximum paged pool size.

My question is what is the right way to deal with the situation I
encountered? I'm not clear on whether I should be playing with the paged
pool size directly in the registry, and since the value I specified doesn't
create an absolute reservation for the system registry, it's not clear that
it is a robust solution. I want to know the *best* way to deal with the
system registry space being exhausted.

--
Will