What are they and do you have any too?

Hearsepilot said:

I'm sure i've read somewhere that this display effect is due to a particular font being used in the display with an defective character mapping resulting in the display of that garbage. Try a different display font.

fishingfool said:

i.m not concerned about it any more, Just curious. What type of characters are they? Im no linguist but they don't appear to be Chinese, or are they?

While obviously suspicious, from what I've read they're more likely bad programming that misinterprets 32 bit Unicode and 8 bit ASCII when adding file extension entries to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.

I've had these before, and it's been going on for a long time. I just delete them.

I do clean installs often and they appear immediately after making file associations with VLC, ( .xspf ), with Notepad++ (. sh ) , or with Xnview ( .webp ). The entries typically take the form of <ext>_auto_file which will appear earlier in the list and point to the command ( program ) it's being associated with.

So you can often chase back these weird '<ext>_auto_file' entries and find what command it's trying to point to. For instance this VLC entry for .xspf files. Oddly enough the correct association still gets entered.



Worth noting, those seen in your image are after 'zune' which is the last ascii character extension in the sort order before these Chinese characters show up. Sometimes other strange character entries will appear at the very beginning, like this Unicode 'BOX' character that represents SOH.



Other's with similar concerns:
Two chinese characters show up as root entries
Regedit shows strange chinese characters in my system - should I be worried?
Weird Chinese Entries In My Registry Solved - Windows 7

Farvatten said:

While obviously suspicious, from what I've read they're more likely bad programming that misinterprets 32 bit Unicode and 8 bit ASCII when adding file extension entries to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.

I've had these before, and it's been going on for a long time. I just delete them.

I do clean installs often and they appear immediately after making file associations with VLC, ( .xspf ), with Notepad++ (. sh ) , or with Xnview ( .webp ). The entries typically take the form of <ext>_auto_file which will appear earlier in the list and point to the command ( program ) it's being associated with.

So you can often chase back these weird '<ext>_auto_file' entries and find what command it's trying to point to. For instance this VLC entry for .xspf files. Oddly enough the correct association still gets entered.

Attachment 404260

Worth noting, those seen in your image are after 'zune' which is the last ascii character extension in the sort order before these Chinese characters show up. Sometimes other strange character entries will appear at the very beginning, like this Unicode 'BOX' character that represents SOH.



Other's with similar concerns:
Two chinese characters show up as root entries
Regedit shows strange chinese characters in my system - should I be worried?
Weird Chinese Entries In My Registry Solved - Windows 7

That's what i meant above, couldn't recall the exact issue.