Fixing the ?Warcraft III\InstallPath? Registry Error

[Silver Knight]

When I was going to patch my copy of WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne (aka WC3) this evening, an error occurred when the patch, War3TFT_121a_121b_English.exe, was executed:

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 Registry error loading key ?Warcraft III\InstallPath?
  The system cannot find the file specified.
The reason I got this error was that my copy of WC3 was from an external backup harddrive, meaning I hadn?t made a fresh install on the harddrive. When I tried to access the Blizzard Support, all I got was ?Knowledge Base currently unavailable?. Searching for it gave moot results, such as ?re-install the game? and ?contact Blizzard?. With a few try-and-fail?s I got it working:

  1. Run the game and make some configurations, then exit game
  2. Run the Registry Editor: Start > Run > regedit
  3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Blizzard Entertainment > Warcraft III
  4. Right-click, choose New > String Value, call it InstallPath
  5. Right-click on InstallPath and choose Modify
  6. In Value Data, write the adress to your W3C folder, for instance E:\Games\Warcraft III\
  7. Click OK, then close Registry Editor
  8. Run patch

The first instruction is just to make sure there?s some registry details for WC3 for the Registry Editor. The configurations you make in-game doesn?t need to be any special. Just turn the background music off, for instance.

Update April 13th: This can also be used when applying StarCraft?s 1.15.2 Upgrade Patch. Follow the instructions above, but instead of the Warcraft III-registry folder, go to Starcraft-folder.

Update Januray 18th, 2009: This post is still popular, but I?m not your all-round WC3 support. If this fix doesn?t help you, maybe you should contact Blizzard? I?ve now turned off commenting on this post. If you absolutely need to, you can contact me here on the forums.