Registry problems on Windows 10 are completely unexpected.
Registry problems on Windows 10 are completely unexpected.
I’m new around here but I really need your assistance. I’ve been dealing with this strange problem I can’t understand. I finally identified what’s behind the error, but it’s something I’ve never encountered before. Over the past two weeks, I’ve experienced five occurrences of the 0cx000021a error. This issue from my research usually happens when the login service fails to start and causes a BSOD. After many attempts without success, I performed a complete reinstall. I installed all Windows updates and drivers, and after rebooting, the same error appeared again about a day later. I thought it might be related to shutdowns during Windows update preparation, so this time I was extra careful—left the PC on for two days and everything seemed fine until today. After work, I restarted the computer and encountered another BSOD 21a. I tried several fixes and discovered the cause was a corrupted registry. I can’t enter safe mode, which makes it possible the driver is involved. The unusual part is that the PC has been running normally for two days. I performed a standard shutdown, and the registry got corrupted. I’m completely confused. Outside of Firefox and the Windows updates, the only thing installed was the latest Nvidia driver. As I’ve been trying to solve this, I’m wondering what could possibly lead to five random registry corruption events after normal shutdowns. In all my experience building and repairing PCs, I’ve never seen this happen. This isn’t a consistent pattern—sometimes it happens in one day, other times after a few days. No malware detected. I kept no files, even zeroed out the drive sectors using a Linux live boot just to confirm. Any advice before things get worse?
Are you sure your system is functioning properly? Problems could stem from insufficient memory or a malfunctioning hard drive.
Both drives are fully functional. There are no RAM problems I can notice. Since I don’t have a dedicated test unit, everything seems to work fine during testing. The main issue is occasional registry corruption when shutting down, which causes strange OS errors. Booting into my Linux drive always works perfectly. I don’t dual boot using the same loader either; each HDD has its own, and I just pick the one I prefer from the BIOS menu.
Starting the installation now, it’s handling all the initial setup tasks with a black screen—seems like unnecessary work. I ran a full format again. Windows is installed and running Memtest to check for RAM issues.
Currently, the main issue seems hardware-related. RAM has been functioning well over the past 9 hours. I’ll recheck the SSD and CPU tonight. One of these components is likely causing a registry corruption during shutdown, which isn’t a permanent issue but a rare edge case. I’ll perform some intense stress tests soon.