Julia no registries found

So today I was trying to install a package and my julia was tking forever, over 10 miuntes so I exited.
I am on a windows machine, I tried follwoing the advice on this trhead: Very slow "Updating registry at 'C:\Users\me\.julia\registries\General'"

Specficially:

pkg> registry rm General

julia> ENV["JULIA_PKG_SERVER"] = ""

pkg> registry add General

but when I run the following:

(@v1.5) pkg> registry st
Registry Status 
  (no registries found)

So I tried:

(@v1.5) pkg> registry up General
registry `General` not found.

(@v1.5) pkg> registry up

(@v1.5) pkg> registry st
Registry Status 
  (no registries found)

What is going on? Should I just reinstall?