I bought a Sony Clié UX50 PDA a few weeks ago. I started noticing that every time I restart my PC (admittedly, not something I do all that often), an incredibly annoying Windows Explorer window set to C:\Program Files\Sony would pop up at the end of the boot sequence.

After a little analysis, it turns out the Sony installer created a registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Palm MulitUser Config with the value C:\Program Files\Sony Handheld\Configtool.exe. Enclosing that in double quotes using Regedit (insert obligatory admonishments about the dangers of Regedit here) fixes the problem. Click here for a screenshot of what it should look like.

Without the double quotes, Windows is thrown off by the space between “Sony” and “Handheld“, and assumes you want to run the command C:\Program Files\Sony with the command-line parameter Handheld\Configtool.exe. As there is no such command C:\Program Files\Sony, Windows just runs the default action for that object, which is to open it in a Windows Explorer window.

I wouldn’t have gone in such excruciating detail about this issue, except:

• Somebody else annoyed with this bug might find this resolution via Google
• It shows how sloppy Sony is about testing its software installers (in passing, note the typo “MulitUser” instead of “MultiUser“)
• That registry folder is where all the startup items that aren’t in the Start menu reside. You might want to have a look at it to see what odd junk resides there, such as obnoxious system tray items like RealPlayer.

Update (2004-01-12):

Sony has an official fix for this problem: PDTREGISTRYUPDATE.EXE.