Mr. Enigma in registry… (XP)

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OK, this is a silly question that has a lot of people on other boards wondering…

SOME users of WinXP Home or Pro have a strange entry in the registry — a key named “Mr. Enigma”. It exists at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoft.

It was apparently installed by Microsoft during the installation of XP and there is NO value or sub-key in the key. No one seems to know exactly what it is for or why it is there, but there have been some dubious explanations. This has been posted on MS boards and still no good answer.

Anyone know?? Thanks.

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Yeah, I have the entry also. Maybe it’s either the name of a rock band or a rebel biker, huh? Be interesting to see if anyone HERE in The Lounge can come up with the answer. Times like this when I wish I had a personal contact at MS!

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One link as a result of a google of ‘mr enigma’ leads to: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mrenigma/%5B/url%5D.

Joe

--Joe

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Sometimes you just never know what M$ does on an install or what software they’ll you temporarily.

Joe

--Joe

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Humorously, the response from some boards has been “it is for a DVD licensing scheme” — which is sort of difficult to swallow. Why would an empty key be used for DVD licensing and why the enigmatic name?

Others have said it is for “future use”. Why would they need to create a key in advance? In case they forget how to do it later??

So far, the only thing believable is that some one at MS was just playing around and stuck it in there for people like us to wonder about. THAT I believe — ’cause that is something I would do!

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Or, if not exactly that, then a dare, or a scaled bet with increasing payouts depending on whether it would make the headlines in chatrooms, tech mags, general papers, or even the airwaves (for a jackpot).

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Perhaps an XP “Easter Egg” ???

Has anyone tried deleting the key ?? And If so, what was the result ??

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Hi, Doc!

I and two IT writing buddies have been on the case since R2 brought it up. I did delete the key last week and have noticed no changes whatsoever (yet, anyway!).

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Hey Bruce,
Knew I could count on you to take that first step !!!

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This was the reply received from Ed Bott:

” It’s here too.

I don’t know, but my educated guess would be that it is a code name for one of the crypto components and is included either for backward compatibility with some long-lost beta code or by accident. You’ll note that some other code names have showed up in the Registry, like Tahoe, and that “Chicago” the code name for Windows 95, shows up in the header for many 32-bit Windows programs!

By definition, an empty Registry key is about as harmless as you can get…

Ed “

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