I took another dip into the registry today. I had to fix the formula editor toolbars for a customer (see below).

Two sections would not dock and the field tree on the left could not be made visible. We tried the field tree icon and right-clicks to allow docking. Nothing worked. I tried using the Toolbar Reset check mark in View > Toolbars. That didn’t work either. He even tried uninstalling and reinstalling Crystal, which also didn’t work.

But I remembered from my last post that the toolbars have lots of registry keys which store their settings and positions and I figured these were corrupted. And since re-installing didn’t solve things that meant the bad registry keys weren’t being replaced by the install. So we did another uninstall and then we went into the registry. Most of the Crystal registry entries had survived the uninstall. I was tempted to delete just the node for the formula editor, but we decided to play it safe and delete the entire node named “Crystal Reports”. It is found in this path:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SAP BusinessObjects\Suite XI 4.0\

We exported this node to a .reg file just in case we needed to restore it and then deleted it.  When we reinstalled Crystal Reports the formula editor went back to normal.

Today I did some more testing because I wasn’t sure if we needed to do the full uninstall.   I closed Crystal, then I went into the registry and exported the “Formula Editor” node. This is found under the “Crystal Reports” node mentioned above.  Once it was exported I deleted the “Formula Editor” node.  I then went into Crystal Reports and worked in the formula editor.  When I checked the registry the “Formula Editor” node had been recreated.  It wasn’t fully populated but it was there.  I went in and did a SQL expression and a custom function and this created more of the keys for that node.  In other words, it may not require a complete re-install to fix this part of the registry.  Crystal appears to create these keys, as needed, when they don’t exist. So if you have windows or toolbars that won’t behave, you can try this approach first.