Mark --
There's a good written response (and apparently a number of non-posted responses) to the original message you cite which calls into question the ability of the script to make those registry modifications.

The responder did, though, identify another registry change which has thus far not been noted:

However, there is another registry-related aspect of the virus that Ihaven't seen mentioned here. When the virus mass-mails itself, it addskeys to the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WAB\
hive for every message it tries to send. In an environment with a "rich" Outlook Address Book, this could result in an attempt to add tens of thousands of registry keys. AFAIK, Win9x has a physical limit of 25 megabytes for the registry - and even under WinNT, adding tens of thousands of keys to the registry is not very healthy for the system. We have had some reports about system crashing because of registry overflow and being impossible to boot again because of registry corruption -although I don't have information whether they were WinNT systems.