Associated primes of Local cohomology modules over Regular rings

Abstract: Let $R$ be an excellent regular ring of dimension $d$ containing a field $K$ of characteristic zero. Let $I$ be an ideal in $R$. We show that $Ass \ H^{d-1}_I(R)$ is a finite set. As an application we show that if $I$ is an ideal of height $g$ with $height \ Q = g$ for all minimal primes of $I$ then for all but finitely many primes $P \supseteq I$ with $height \ P \geq g +2$, the topological space $Spec^\circ(R_P/IR_P)$ is connected.