Question: 

My Petz game won't work.  Help!!

Answer:

You don't give me any real clues to work with, but here goes. does the game 
freeze on the opening screen? Does it throw up an error message? Does nothing 
at all happen when you double-click on either the shortcut or the exe itself?

If you have Windows XP and recently installed SP2, try removing smapi.dll and 
setupapi.dll and, perhaps, dsetup32.dll and DSETUP.dll from the game. If that's 
not the answer, then it could be a corrupt item or messed-up Registry problem.  
Remove all downloaded or hexed items from your game and reset the Registry or 
clean it out.  See below for how to deal with that.  If your game is Petz 4 and
you have XP, grab the latest update from the official ftp site
ftp://ftp.ubisoft.com/games/petz4/patches/ or grab Petza from Nicholas' site
http://www.sherlocksoftware.org/page.php?id=6
If your problem is with Petz 3 in XP, get Petza -- it fixes the sound bug.

If the problem is a "corrupt pet" error message, the game would still start but 
would not show that pet. Removing the pet from the Adopted folder would cure that.

If the problem is a freeze or an error message other than "corrupt pet", then hold 
down the Ctrl and Shift keys on your keyboard as you start up the game, and say yes 
when it asks if you mean it.

If that doesn't solve it, then remove all downloaded or hexed items from the game 
and put them somewhere safe elsewhere on your hard drive, then try the Ctrl Shift 
trick again.

If that doesn't solve it, then try a more thorough Registry clean-out for 
whichever version of the game you're running; it removes all extra data that 
a simple ctrl-shift reset or reinstallation doesn't. To clean out the Registry, 
delete any .lkv files that are in your game's Resource\keys directory.  Don't
panic if you don't have any .lkv files or even if you don't have a keys directory.
The point is that you don't want any .lkv files in there at this time.  Now go to 
Start, type Regedit.exe followed by Enter in the Run box, navigate by clicking on 
the crosses in the left pane till you get to 

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz II\1.00.01
or
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz 3\3.00.01
or
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PF.Magic\Petz 4\4.00.00
or
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\StudioMythos\Petz 5\4.00.00

depending on which of the games it is that you have (you _really_ didn't give
me any clues, did you??)  then choose Edit Delete from the main menu. Reboot, and 
open the game again.

If it's still not fixed, then maybe someone who has the same Operating System 
as you do can help. I have Windows 95, I have no idea what OS you have.

Good luck

Carolyn Horn