System File Protection Pop-Ups

There's not a whole lot of information available for Windows Millennium Edition® (Windows ME for short) these days and there's not a whole lot of people who are fond of it. Yet with System File Protection (SFP) and System Restore it was a forerunner to the Windows XP operating system in many ways.

For those of you would like to know when SFP actually does something the process is fairly simple and generally painless.

 Before attempting the following make sure you read and understand Registry Editing Warning.

1. Click the Start button
2. Click Run...
3. Type regedit
4. Click OK
5. Navigate to:
6. Find and right click the "ShowPopups"
7. Modify it's hexadecimal value from 0 to 1
8. Close out the registry editor
9. Reboot
10. Delete (send to the recycle bin) the ARIAL.TTF from the fonts folder
11. Watch — it will recreate itself
12. Now you'll get a warning letting you know that it's restored a system file

The "ShowPopups" value is certain to be there, if not make a new DWORD with the value of 00000001 and named "ShowPopups" and you will be all set. For those of you who aren't willing to try to do it manually (as described above) download and open/merge the registry files below.

Download:
WinMESFPPopEnable.reg (to Enable)
WinMESFPPopDisable.reg (to Disable)

If you really want to get into the inner workings of SFP, and there's not a whole lot of documentation, you can open C:\Windows\System\SFP (or %WinDir%\System\SFP for those using an alternate install location) and you'll find two files of interest.

The first is SFPDB.SFP and if opened with a text editor will let you know what files are actually being protected. I've never actually tried to modify this and am not about to recommend that anyone else do so either.

The second is SFPLOG.TXT which can be read to see what's been done by SFP and to see when it did it and the likes. You can go ahead and actually open it, right click, select all, and delete it if you want to clear it out and start fresh.

System File Protection has been in all operating systems, in one form or another since it's introduction into Windows Millennium Edition and while you haven't been given any warnings when it's in effect it's probably been there in the background saving you (often from yourself *grin*) for quite some time now.

OS: ME > Advanced
Date: 15/15/05

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