Setting every registry value to zero in Windows 10 breaks most features—but Paint and WordPad cling on until the very last

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing a Windows error, informing the user that it can no longer run .exe files.

Here's a lesson I learned very early on in my PC adventures—when it comes to the Windows registry, tread very carefully. While individual entries can be modified to do a number of useful things, change the wrong value and you can soon find yourself in a heap of trouble.

While that's still the case, it turns out Windows 10 seems to be a lot more resilient to mass registry edits than you might expect. YouTube channel Come on Windows has taken it to the extreme, modifying every entry to contain a zero value (via Tom's Hardware). And while doing so breaks the vast majority of features, (.exe files no longer run, for example), Windows 10 will apparently still run, allow logins and logouts, and even allow a bit of messing around in Paint and WordPad.