Vista and MS Office problems - registry releated

Here's the deal:

The Office registry key and all it's child keys have lost their access permission lists and the owner. Thus, as soon as I try to do anything I'm simply errored out - no permission. That includes installing or reinstalling or repairing MSO 2007. I can, of course, go and change the permissions (ie add the owner as myself and add everyone to the access list) on the keys, but I'd have to do this for ALL of the keys below Office, since when I'm trying to apply the changes to the children keys, I'm errored out.

Any Ideas on how I could brutally or elegantly delete the office key and all it's subkeys? That would allow me to re-install MSO 2007 and rebuild the keys with proper permissions.

Thanks!

What did you do to cause this?

You might want to take a look at this.

Or, a registry cleaner. I use Registy Mechanic 2008, and it works well. I did have a problem with a new version of One Note 2007, and RM08. Locked out of my private data. Had to blow it away and lost 10 minutes work. ;)

i dunno what I could've possibly done to cause such problems. Lets just hope the registry mechanic will be able to do something. Kinda dumb from Vista to disallow even itself to edit the office keys....