Thank you SOOO much!  You have solved a problem that has been a thorn in my side for quite a while.

Thank you for the tutorial. Nice job.  Can I copy a HKCU setting into temporary loaded hive, and if yes how do I copy the hkcu key to the loaded hive? Thank you

You are the magic man! This fixed a problem that has been niggling me for ages. Thank you!

This is the answer that defies all of those "expert" opinions that "You can't do that".

Thank you!

I would also like to know how to configure HKLM keys for the loaded Default User hive. Please give instructions!

HKLM is HKLM no matter what user.  It's not tied to any specific profile.

Could not do it, got message after giving key name, cannot load: Error while loading hive.

My Registry will not load hive, I noticed my NTUSER file is type Textfile, I think this is the problem. Previously I tried to restore and import a saved registry.dat file and it would only load .reg files.

I am thinking I could convert this saved reg file from dat to reg, but i would need  a converting program.

Any other ideas.

This started when I mistakenly deleted my Admin  user profile, and am now on a temp user. I noticed on my Regedit User Profile I have a .bak file, it does not have the original file shown in it, but has a RunLogonScript entry. I tried to rename it without the .bak  and also deleted the temp file, but on start up it just started with another temp file but also returned he original,bak file.

so let me get this straight> sometimes i can't figure out if the blog is showing me what i want to do.

i want to load windows 8 onto a machine, then customize the hell out of it. creating color themes, enlarging the font dpi etc.

then i want to save all of that information extraneous to the 'default profile' of the machine. i believe in profiles, it showed 32mb of data?? can i load that 32mb onto a new windows 8 installation, and not have to go through my process of setting up every new re-image the long way? It takes me about 30 minutes to get everything right, and i can create a beautiful desktop, but i know there is a faster way. i can translate instructions from any os, if someone would tell me im on the right track. thanks.

You mention at the top this is for Win 2000 and up, but how do I do this for Win 2000?  I have no File option in the Registry Editor, the first option in the Menu bar is Registry, with only Import, Export and Connect options.

@Ken C - For win2000, use REGEDT32 which has more functionality than Regedit, although it lacks searching. In later versions of windows they combined REGEDT32 and Regedit into one.