How to access the Registry

Let's pick an easy one and see if we can fix it - RegIdleBackup.

That is the task that every 10 days takes a snapshot of your registry files and save a copy in this folder:

c:\windows\system32\config\regback 

Take a look out in that folder and see a copy of the 5 registry files.

Some folks say that backup occurs "sometimes", "every now and then" and "once in a while" but it really occurs ever 10 days according to the task parameters.

In your Task Scheduler, find that task, see if you can right click and Run it or not...

Then right click it and Export it someplace safe (just in case) and it will be saved as a .XML file:

The Delete the suspicious Task.

In an empty spot that same Window right click and choose to Import, change to 'All files...', and navigate to the folder where you unzipped the Windows 7 Tasks from The Repair Tasks download (mine is on my desktop) and choose the RegIdleBackup file, click Open:

Before clicking OK, click on Settings and enable the Task to run on demand, then click OK to save it:

The right click the Task and Run it, click Refresh (or press F5 to refresh) and see how it looks:

Then if you look in c:\windows\system32\config\regback folder the files should have today's date and time.  Yea!

If that task is working now, do whatever you have to do to see the 20 afflicted tasks and see if now there are only 19 afflicted tasks (may need to reboot).

This is the list of corrupted tasks:

User Task

System Task

UsbCeip

KernelCeip Task

ScheduleDefrag

Scheduled

Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticDataCollector

Notifications

WinSAT

LPRemove

BackgroundConfigSurveyor

AnalyzeSystem

RacTask

RegIdleBackup

WindowsParentalControls

SR

IPAddressConflict2

IPAddressConflict1

SynchronizeTime

QueueReporting

That's a good start.

I doubt you are going to be able to find anything you can use on the Recovery Partition - that is what you use when you want to restore your system to the as shipped from the factory condition which is usually a last resort kind of thing since it will (likely) wipe out your current installation, then you would have a lot of work to do.

If you can identify the corrupted tasks could it be that they are some that came with your preinstalled system and are specific to HP or can you look at them and say that they really look like legitimate Windows tasks?

Some tasks may have been created/installed by other programs you might have installed since your Windows 7 was new or came from HP.  I know some ASUS systems have their own folder of Tasks:

So the RepairTasks won't be able to fix things like that.

Things like Adobe, Google, etc. sometimes create tasks too (but not in the Microsoft folder).

From Task Scheduler or the error messages can you tell if the corrupted tasks are in the Microsoft folder or some other folder?

I have read where (after flipping back to Windows 7) when corrupted tasks remain some folks just delete them to keep the thing from complaining and sometimes don't know what the tasks are for or if they need them or not so they just whack them and hope things are okay after that.

If you can identify/tell us the names of some of the corrupted tasks we can maybe help if they are Windows tasks (tasks are just XML files that you can import into Task Scheduler).

The repairtasks has reduced the number of corrupt tasks. (Thanks a lot.) There are now 20 of them. I don't have a Windows 7 disk to dig out the uncorrupted tasks from because the OS came pre-installed on my HP Pavilion Entertainment PC. I tried to look in the Recovery partition but I get an HP warning sign and I can't find a way to actually access the files.

Of course you did.

This seems to be a problem where after returning to Windows 7 the parts of the registry containing the information for Scheduled Tasks is restored, but the task definitions themselves are not restored (still Windows 10 definitions) resulting in an inconsistency between the two and then things don't "line up", you are going to get these kinds of errors.

You might be able to fix it using a link from CodePlex but who knows what other things are not going to be the same or what other problems you are going to discover - you may end up having to whack your system and reinstall your Windows 7 from scratch.

Here is a link to a piece of software that will attempt to repair this condition with Scheduled Tasks.

https://repairtasks.codeplex.com/

You should first read the Home tab to better understand the problem.

On the Download tab you can download the RepairTasks.zip and the Windows7Tasks.zip and unzip them to your desktop or someplace you can find them.

It wouldn't hurt to at least browse some of the Reviews from other people with similar issues.

The go to the Documentation tab and at least read through the process so you can sort of understand what your are going to be doing.

Then you can launch and run the RepairTasks.exe and let it scan your system for problems.

If there are no problems you are done.

If there are problems you can go through the documentation and follow the directions to attempt to repair your tasks or even replace all of the default Windows 7 tasks with copies of "good" tasks from a fresh Windows 7 installation (the contents of the Windows7Tasks ZIP file has all the tasks).

If you have problems with Repair Tasks, go to the Discussions tab, register and start a discussion out there.

I have simulated many error conditions with Windows 7 tasks and this Repair Tasks fixes everything I could break on purpose but I have never done the Windows 10 back to Windows 7 thing and don't plan on it.

If you look in this Windows 7 community there are many many posts of problems with that upgrade/downgrade procedure...  booting problems, task problems, authentication problems, update problems,  lots of things have the potential to become afflicted but by some miracle the upgrade and downgrade actually works sometimes.

If you are able to get your Scheduled Tasks patched up who knows what other issues you are going to come across later of things that used to work and now don't.

When the process fails it looks like you are going to be in for potentially days and maybe weeks of "trying" things and suggestions that often don't work and the best thing to do probably is to backup all your personal data (possible even if your system does not boot) and just reinstalling your Windows from scratch or performing a factory reset on your system of unspecified make and model.

You've already started down the path of "trying" things and that isn't working out so well is it?  It might have gone better if somebody would have asked what the error message was and if the system used to work properly what do you think happened to it

• but now we know.

Reinstalling is a lot of work but may be the only way to be sure you can get back to stability.