You could try using the wonderful regmon tool from www.sysinternals.com to see what emplode is doing.

However if you have "impending registry death" then a reinstall as soon as possible would be best...

I have a machine suffering from "impending registry death". It has been running Win2K without a reinstall since Win2K was released, which is quite an achievement in itself. It has been unhappy for a couple of months now, I keep telling myself "reinstall Win2K before you lose stuff", but it's my main workstation and there is just so much to reinstall. So instead I end up rebooting it once a day when things start crapping out.