Registry Cleaners?

[Dude111]

I have no further input on this and wish anyone who stumbles upon this thread good luck, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Im sorry Niclo,i dont wanna make you mad...... You have EXCELLENT POINTS! (For people who arent experienced in registry,etc)

Please forgive me buddy....

[Niclo Iste]

I'm not mad, I just want to stress the importance of not messing with the registry unless you know exactly what you are doing and what your end goal is. Even if a program looks like it's doing something useful try to use it in a test environment first and gauge the affects. I learned a lot about the registry with test environments and only use "cleaners" as a faster way of doing what would take me an hour or more by hand manually deleting. I speak from experience when i say I look for what files I want the cleaner to remove because I know what files were needed removed in the first place. Even in those situations I've still had the utility damage the system and corrupt other programs. In fact a month ago I had to redo my system because the cleaner somehow made it where my firewall was damaged when I had it only help me remove the registry keys for another firewall that was accidentally installed. It was only after the fact that I realized that several of the keys should have been re-mapped rather than removed.

[Dude111]

I hear ya and im sorry that happend to ya

[Green_Eyed]

...not messing with the registry unless you know exactly what you are doing and what your end goal is. ....

I do not understand some people's obsession with cleaning the registry. I understand if there is an entry that is actually doing something to cause harm (or annoyance or disruption, etc.) But if the entry points to nothing how much harm is it causing.

No, it's a serious question, really.

I understand the point about removing entries that were not removed after a program was removed. But I can think of no other instance where "cleaning" your registry has value.

[Niclo Iste]

Example:

Back in the good ol' days of windows 98, Norton wouldn't always uninstall correctly same with McAfee. The best way to deal with it was delete the folders. Go into the registry and manually search out the associations with the program in question. If you didn't you'd end up with a barrage of missing dll, links, and exe file errors on the screen. Not to mention there would be phantom indications of utilities and functions that were no longer there. So when it came down to it if you wanted to make sure that the errors didn't come up and processes that weren't needed anymore to be running to stay off you were better off digging for each registry key to remove them or remap them. In most cases you had to do the registry first and then follow up by deleting the folder. Some times you had to do a secondary or even tertiary cleaning of the registry even after that just to get some errors to stop. It was fun times.

[Green_Eyed]

Example:

Back in the good ol' days of windows 98, Norton wouldn't always uninstall correctly same with McAfee. The best way to deal with it was delete the folders. Go into the registry and manually search out the associations with the program in question. ...

Um...that's what I said...

...I understand the point about removing entries that were not removed after a program was removed. But I can think of no other instance where "cleaning" your registry has value.

It just seems to me that there was a time in the Win9X era in which programs were not removed completely. Then a whole industry popped up to "clean the registry." Their scare tactics were more hype than truth and people fell for the whole "Clean your registry" come-on. They likened invalid entries in the regsitry with all types of malware. They make it sound like your registry can get so large it will fill your hard drive if you don't "clean" it.

[Ferrit]

Just so see Dude111 that I see this all the time. Here is a log of the place where i give free tech support which occurred tonight.
<WDGuest728> hello
<WDGuest728> can someone please help me with a networking problem that I am having
<WDGuest728> I am having problems connecting to my homegroup
<Ferrit> what problems
<WDGuest728> I just reset my computer to factory settings and now I cannot connect to the homegroup I previously created before I reset the computer
<WDGuest728> and Im sorry I was waiting for someone to give me the go ahead if they were able to help me
<Ferrit> was this the computer that originally created the homegroup
<WDGuest728> yes
<Ferrit> most likely you need to go to the others in the group and delete them from the homegroup
<Ferrit> and start all over again
<Ferrit> by the way why did you need to reset your computer to start with?
<WDGuest728> my computer continuously was freezing and when I researched i found i had a problem with the registry
<Ferrit> viruses?
<WDGuest728> no i do not think i had a virus since I had protection (Norton)
<WDGuest728> I had ran a registry cleaner a few days ago and that was when the problems began
<Ferrit> heh a registry cleaner
<Ferrit> there is no such a thing
<Ferrit> registry trasher is what you used

<WDGuest728> i had tuneup utilities and it told me to clean the registry so i went ahead and did it
<Ferrit> lol

Like I said it happens all the time