When I first began playing with Enterprise Guide version 4, every so often when I would try to create or import data, I would get an error that said "There was an error creating the new data set". Within a 2 to 3 month span, I must have had this error around 7 times. The only fix is to re-install SAS Base. Re-installing EG4 will not be enough to fix the problem. And at first I thought you had to remove everything SAS related before reinstalling, but it turns out you just have to install SAS Base again (no need to uninstall first).

Anyway, I just got the error today and I finally figured out what what the culprit is. I somewhat regularly maintain my computers using CCleaner and RegScrubXP. Both allow a person to clean up "bogus" or incorrect entries or keys in the registry on Windows computers.

Somehow, one or both of these peices of software are flagging something that SAS needs to run correctly as bogus information in the registry (or some temporary files are being deleted by CCleaner).

I’ll either be extremely careful with using these tools to clean the registry, or I’ll not even bother using the tools at all.

Note that I did start a google groups thread on this here.