In a rush and packed with a lot of experience from the previous installation I went on by the day before and re-installed my new gaming rig. It’s now a setup I actually like and what fits my quality standards. I hate PCs that include a driver farm or orphans from previous and malfunctioning drivers, like I had on the setup before. What I did before was to install everything automated from the DVD that came with the motherboard and a lot of drivers and software has been beta. Updating and upgrading was a real pain in the ass. After this whole procedure I had more failures than before.
Whatsoever, this first installment was for testing purposes only and it wasn’t intended to be for eternity. I’m now having the system with all the drivers I actually needed. The version numbers I wanted. And the hardware tools are functional. The only bug I actually had, was to be found in the Windows Game Explorer. I have to add, that I use the Vista Game Explorer Editor to get all my games correctly listed in the Windows Game Explorer. First games that I install, besides Steam, is the Blizzard bundle, like StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo etc.
After installing these games I opened the WGE to scan for new games. The only game that got updated was StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo II was abandoned with an ugly icon. I then tried to use the VGEE, it found StarCraft and was set up correctly. I restarted VGEE and when I tried to edit some more games I was welcomed by an error message and all the previously added games were deleted from list.
I’ll make it short, the only way to fix this very issue was to uninstall them. Check out the WGE for errors. Additionally did I go to the registry entry of the WGE and assured that there is nothing left from previous game installations. I also deleted the link files that were left in my user profile. I then re-installed the games that were causing these errors. I opened the WGE to let him scan for new games. After that I went to the registry entries of WGE and deleted the entries that were added for the new games. I also found one empty entry that was removed, too. Link files in the WGE section created in my user profile were deleted again. Et voilá, I was able to open VGEE and getting update information on games without errors our devastating my WGE list.
I’m pretty sure that there are more games out there causing errors like these and most likely they will be caused due to this empty entry key in the registry. It sure will be a good decision to backup WGE’s registry keys AND soft links before actually editing the WGE with VGEE. I first found this issue after having installed around 60 games and this made me more than just angry.