Never use a Registry Cleaner!!! They do more harm than good!
If you can't manually work in your Registry, leave it alone, or get a
competent Computer Technician to do it for you.

Try doing a disk cleanup, delete temp files, delete temp internet files.
Cut back on number of restore Points, delete Programs that you don't use.
Check for Spyware.
There is so much you can do without touching the Registry.

None. See:

http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099 - registry cleaner thread

Malke

and to answer your question without paranoia, warranted or not,

JV16 Power Tools 2008
and
SuperWin RegVac Registry Cleaner

are both x64 compatible, and very handy lil aps.  You will, of course,
want to make sure to back up all changes you make, in case they do cause
issues.

Well i have use Registry Mechanic and i have found that it removes
pretty much everything you need to worry about and so far it has caused
no problems with me.
It saves so much time over doing it manualy and does not cause any
problems with performence. (atleast it didnt with me in the last year or
so that i have used it with 2 machines.)
But i dont know if it will work with a 64 bit os.

Registry "cleaning" may seem like a good idea, but can you really attribute
any improvement in performance to it?  I've tried it from time to time and
I've never noticed the slightest difference.  On the other hand, I have seen
registry cleaners damage the registry resulting in programs not loading
properly.  One thing you can do to optimize the registry which IS safe is to
defrag/compress it.  There are a number of free utilities, such as NTRegOpt
which do this.

As others have mentioned there are many safe ways to optimize a Windows
system which do produce noticeable gains in performance.  If you need
suggestions just ask.

DirtyDawg;751643 Wrote:

Hi DirtyDawg,

This will help improve your computer's performance better than just a
registry cleaner can.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/81176-speed-up-performance-vista.html

However, I have used the free Wise Registry Cleaner program without
having any problems with it.

'WiseCleaner.com - Downloads'
(http://www.wisecleaner.com/download.html)

Hope this helps,
Shawn

perform regular disk cleanup, defrag - i suggest not using antivirus as this
will cause more frustrations (but if you found one that best suit your needs
that's OK) - use the best firewall instead - scan your PC of spyware daily.

system restore makes your PC much worst after you run it so much as well
disable it - i suggest careful manual registry cleaning as it require
perseverance and studiosness to manually clean the registry file

The only way to 'clean' the registry is to do it manually. In most cases the
software that purports to be able to clean the registry causes more problems
than it solves. If you are not confident enough to manually remove defunct
registry entries then leave the registry well alone and keep as far away
from registry cleaners as you possible can.

'RegCure Free Download' (http://www.fast-download.info/regcure.html)

I've bought it for my Vista 32 Ultimate - no problems so far - has good
critiques in the Internet.

But it's a heck of a leap to assume there's a registry problem, or that
"cleaning" the registry makes any difference at all to responsiveness.

I've been playing around with these damn things for years and can tell you
three things:

1/ Running a registry cleaner gives you a warm feeling as you tell yourself
you've "improved" things in your computer.

2/ Your computer doesn't share your feelings because it doesn't have any.
Never, not once, have I honestly been able to spot an improvement in
responsiveness by cleaning (or defragging) the registry.

3/ On a handful of occasions I've actually buggered up some functionality as
a result of using registry cleaning tools, and had to restore the backup.
Sometimes you don't notice the problem for a few days, which is actually the
worst kind of problem.

My conclusion is that they are the 21st century equivalent of snake oil.
Don't waste your time (and run the risk of breaking something).

SteveT

i use Auslogics Registry cleaner and no problems :D

Thank you all very much for your input.  I'll mull it all over/do more
research and then make my decision as to what to do.  Again, I appreciate
the input.

    Any so-called registry "cleaner" is nothing more than a worthless
snake oil remedy whose sole purpose is to separate you from some of your
money.

   Why do you think you'd ever need to clean your registry?  What
specific *problems* are you actually experiencing (not some program's
bogus listing of imaginary problems) that you think can be fixed by
using a registry "cleaner?"

    If you do have a problem that is rooted in the registry, it would
be far better to simply edit (after backing up, of course) only the
specific key(s) and/or value(s) that are causing the problem.  After
all, why use a chainsaw when a scalpel will do the job?  Additionally,
the manually changing of one or two registry entries is far less likely
to have the dire consequences of allowing an automated product to make
multiple changes simultaneously.  The only thing needed to safely clean
your registry is knowledge and Regedit.exe.

    The registry contains all of the operating system's "knowledge" of
the computer's hardware devices, installed software, the location of the
device drivers, and the computer's configuration.  A misstep in the
registry can have severe consequences.  One should not even turning
loose a poorly understood automated "cleaner," unless he is fully
confident that he knows *exactly* what is going to happen as a result of
each and every change.

    Having repeatedly seen the results of inexperienced people using
automated registry "cleaners,"  I can only advise all but the most
experienced computer technicians (and/or hobbyists) to avoid them all.
Experience has shown me that such tools simply are not safe in the hands
of the inexperienced user.  If you lack the knowledge and experience to
maintain your registry by yourself, then you also lack the knowledge and
experience to safely configure and use any automated registry cleaner,
no matter how safe they claim to be.

    More importantly, no one has ever demonstrated that the use of an
automated registry "cleaner," particularly by an untrained,
inexperienced computer user, does any real good, whatsoever.  There's
certainly been no empirical evidence offered to demonstrate that the use
of such products to "clean" WinXP's registry improves a computer's
performance or stability.  Given the potential for harm, it's just not
worth the risk.

    Granted, most registry "cleaners" won't cause problems each and
every time they're used, but the potential for harm is always there.
And, since no registry "cleaner" has ever been demonstrated to do any
good (think of them like treating the flu with chicken soup - there's no
real medicinal value, but it sometimes provides a warming placebo
effect), I always tell people that the risks far out-weigh the
non-existent benefits.

    I will concede that a good registry *scanning* tool, in the hands
of an experienced and knowledgeable technician or hobbyist can be a
useful time-saving diagnostic tool, as long as it's not allowed to make
any changes automatically.  But I really don't think that there are any
registry "cleaners" that are truly safe for the general public to use.
Experience has proven just the opposite: such tools simply are not safe
in the hands of the inexperienced user.

Most people will tell you to not use one at all.  I have used CleanMyPC
when reinstalling software wouldn't work.  It seems to do the trick just fine.
the stubborn software would then install with no problem.  I don't use the cleaner
on a regular basis, just when I need it.  I do know what the registry entries do
and could do all the work myself but a good registry cleaner saves me a lot of
time.

Tom Lake

Makes one wonder why Microsoft makes a registry cleaner part of Live One
Care?
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/article/registry_cleaner_why.htm

I searched for a benchmark for these Registry Cleaners and couldn't find any
substantiating their claims, so I performed my own.
While simple in nature and very limited, it provided some information on the
topic:

1. Made a full backup so I could recover after this experiment.
2. Installed a popular benchmark (3DMark08) that would give me a base number
to compare before and after.
3. Installed CCleaner, which seems to get more recommendations than most
from this newsgroup.

History:
My computer is used to test lots of software, so I have a lot of garbage
registry entries from all the products I install, including MS Office 2003,
DVD/CD burners, games, etc. (I mention these because they are currently all
uninstalled with the uninstaller provided by the vendor. Yet, if you look in
the registry, there are traces of each all over the place.) I run Avast as
my anti-virus and Windows Firewall. (These were left on for both the before
and after.)

Run 1: As-is
 Scores:
    5301 (generic score)
    6209 (GPUs)
    3684 (CPUs)

Run 2: Run CCleaner to remove all extraneous files (224 MB) and registry
entries (114.) I used no discrimination... just remove it all automatically.
  Scores:
     5291 (generic score)
     6214 (GPUs)
     3660 (CPUs)

In a nutshell, little to no change. What change did occur is a reduction in
performance.
When I look through the registry, the links to missing files have been
removed, but all the User Options, Preferences, File Associations, Version,
etc are still present.

I need a better uninstaller. Not a registry cleaner.

Use CCleaner. It's really good, and it has a registry cleaner built in
to it. I use it every week, and it always get at least 150-800 MB of
junk off my computer. Haven't had any problems with it so far. And it
supports Vista SP1.