Cleaning the registry is like putting your finger in your eye. It's an
unpleasant experience to do only when necessary, and carefully at that.
Getting some 'automated' way to do it is like taking a speck out of your eye
with an electric toothbrush.

Most will recommend against any registry cleaners.
I use CCleaner ... it both gets rid of temp internet files, temp files, and
other selectable items in one fell swoop.
And has an option for removing "lost" registry entries.
I 've never had an issue.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

Unless you know exactly what you are doing, and I suspect not, or how to
recover your system when the use of such a third party tool renders the
system inoperable, avoid them, they are not really necessary anyway, and
have not been snce win9*

    There is no such thing as a "good" registry cleaner, free or otherwise.

   Why do you even 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
wide-spread 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.

I use Crap Cleaner once in a while.
It's free and have had no problems with it.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

I only use a registry cleaner because I often do searches in the registry
and it keeps the search time down if you remove useless keys.
If you have no need to do searches etc. then I wouldn't bother with a cleaner.
Cleaning your registry won't make your machine suddenly better, and there is a chance
it might remove something you didn't want it to.

If you do decide to use one, check carefully what it wants to remove.
.

Hello Liebach,

<http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html>

<http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099>
- -- --

The wisest thing to do is 'leave well alone' If you are not capable or
competent to manually edit the registry then the vast majority of registry
cleaner will simply make matters worse. While I agree that CCleaner is
useful for general cleaning of Temporary internet files, cookies, MRU's etc.
I rarely use the registry cleaner option and when I have used it there are
only ever 2 entries available for deletion; and as I know exactly what these
entries are they are left exactly where they are.

Great advice, John.

I'd like to add the following from a post I made at the Malwarebytes
Forum:

'in need of a free safe registry cleaner - Malwarebytes Security
Forums'
(http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4269&pid=16219&mode=threa
ded&start=0#entry16219)

The main reason is that it is sometimes hard as heck to figure out what
is needed by the system and what is not. When Norton SystemWorks (and
previous versions of the Norton Utilities) included a registry cleaner,
I used to run it completely manually, so that I would have to select
each 'error' and wade through whether it was really an error or simply
Norton being silly and trying to hose me. It took much much longer that
way, but I saved myself from hosing systems numerous times. It got to
the point where I finally started making an exceptions list of keys that
it would find on every scan that it wanted to delete that *I* knew
actually needed to be there.

The basic premise is this - there is no possible way for a computer
program to be ready for each and every program ever written for Windows
and how it stores info (if it does so at all) in the registry. Thus, a
reg cleaner, and especially an automatic one, is just as prone to make
mistakes as a novice who is given weak instructions on how to find
supposedly offending registry keys, a copy of regedit, and told to
remove all offending keys, even those that 'seem' offensive.

The heavy reliance on the registry that Windows makes these days makes
it sometimes impossible to recover from a hosed registry, unless you
really know what you are doing - and with more and more systems being
sold with only a single HD, and without separate partitions for system /
OS and for data, you simply take too big of a risk in hosing your
computer, and then having to format and start from scratch.

Even with my pretty strong experience with using registry cleaners in
the past, I shun them now and watch very carefully what I *do* delete
with automatic cleaners like CCleaner. It's just a matter of "Better
safe than sorry."