I wanted to figure out why my Steam icon gets hidden again every now and then and I have to go back and set it to "Show icon and notifications" (in Windows 7). A google search returned a page that recommended various things, monitoring the Registry one of them. I tried to do that using the Sysinternals Process Monitor, but that showed me like 10s of thousands of events per second! So I tried to close various things to get the event load down. AVG seemed to be a big cause of them so I temporarily disabled it using it's own UI, but it was still causing lots of events. So I tried to kill it's processes, and googled again. Result recommended disabling the Watchdog service and restarting. Did that, and it certainly seemed to have lessened the events a bit. Except there was still so much noise, so I filtered out almost every process in Process Monitor, and then went and manually changed the "Show icon and notifications" to "Only show notifications", but there were still so many registry events that I gave up. Now I tried turning AVG on again, but it didn't work. I could not enable the Watchdog service any more (access denied or whatever). After a couple of restarts, I tried to uninstall AVG, but that also failed! It couldn't delete another service. Finally, I chose to "Repair" AVG and surprisingly that turned it back on. Whew! 2 hours later, I'm no closer to solving my original problem. Welcome to the future!