Registry Check causes reboot

Hi All,

Thank you for your time and help, may you and all of your children, wives, bread and cars be blessed and praised.

My friend has a computer running XP home, when he runs a spyware checker as routine mainenance it does fine until it gets to the registry scan, then it reboots, if he looks at the registry manually it reboots as soon as he clicks on an item. He has reformatted the computer, fresh install of windows on a new hard drive and it still does the same thing. Any ideas on what's going wrong? he says it wasn't doing this several months ago but is now.

Welcome to windows!

Actually I don't know. If you go to start, run, regedit, and click on something, it reboots? Am I getting that right?

yes, that's right, he clicks on something and it reboots, any time something is done to the registry the comp reboots

Just a hunch but it could be bad memory.

Has he tried booting up in safe mode and trying the same thing?