Power Manager issue - cannot view/create 'Plans'

[Steerpike]

For some bizarre reason I cannot access or create Power Plans on the 'Power Plan' tab of ThinkVantage Power Manager. I can launch Power Manager, but on the Power Plan tab, the 'Plan Name' field and drop-down are emtpy, and the 'new/edit/delete' boxes are grayed out. Everything below 'System Settings' is empty' on the right side, in the two columns under 'Battery settings' and 'AC settings'.

I've run as an admin, makes no difference.

I'll continue to troubleshoot this, just wondering if anyone has any tips. Thanks!

[ryengineer]

Please refer to the following thread:

Power Manager.

I've seen this problem happen usually when one installs another Power Manager like NHC.

[Steerpike]

Thanks for the tip; I found those threads earlier while researching this, but took another look. Sadly, I exported the HCU\Control Panel\PowerCfg tree from the 'bad' computer and the same tree from a 'good' computer and they matched 100% (not just visually, but using 'beyond compare').

Maybe I should mention, I'm on Vista. I installed Process Monitor (new flavor of the old 'regmon' tool) and watched what happened when the Power Manager displays that screen. I saw that it was reading from
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\User\PowerSchemes. So then I started looking at the registry directly. In this registry path, I saw a LOT of entries - pages and pages worth. I compared to my 'good' machine, and there were only about 10 entries. I decided to get daring and deleted them all, and noticed that, every time I launched Power Manager it created MORE entries. My gut feeling is, there is a registry access/permissions problem, it's unable to read the current settings, and it's creating a bunch of new ones each time, but somehow not able to use them once created.

I'm first going to try exporting the whole 'Power' key referenced above (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\User\PowerSchemes) from a good machine and importing it. If that fails, I'll uninstall, clean the registry one more time, then reinstall. If that fails, it's bye-bye ThinkVantage Power Manager, Hello built-in Vista Power Manager!
Thanks!