There has to be a way to shrink MFT reserved zone

Anyone know of a reliable way to shrink the size of the MFT in XP without installing a program like PerfectDisk or Diskeeper? The method most commonly given is to create a new DWORD value in the registry (NtfsMftZoneReservation = 1,2,3 or 4), but it doesn't work for me. I tried ControlSet001, 002, 003 and CurrentControlSet, rebooting each time but nothing. Is there more to it or am I doing something wrong? I can't believe there's not some easy way to do this. I would just use PD or DK but I've got one logical drive that even they don't work on.

 

Finally cracked it.

Windows, in it's infinite wisdom, stores regular data in the MFT reserved zone and it has to be removed first. I did it with MyDefrag, there may be others. Once that was done, PerfectDisk boot-time shrunk it without any problem.