and as pointed out in Malke's response, use the backup feature before
allowing any registry entries to be removed. I agree that it is unnecessary
and potentially harmful.
There are no good registry cleaners, free or otherwise.
I strongly suggest you avoid using any registry cleaning program.
Cleaning of the registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the
registry alone and don't use any registry cleaner. Despite what many
people think, and what vendors of registry cleaning software try to
convince you of, having unused registry entries doesn't really hurt
you.
The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.
--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
Please Reply to the Newsgroup
No. There are no good registry cleaners for Vista.
There are no good registry cleaners, for any version of Windows. Running any
of the popular registry cleaners is like washing your hair with petroleum:
sure it gets out the oil, but ...
The task is harder in Vista because of new aspects to the Vista registry,
like virtualisation (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927387/en-us). A
registry cleaner would need to be specifically designed for Vista.
Even then, any registry cleaner is high risk, for little benefit. Don't
bother. As you can see, this opinion is shared by Malke, Ken Blake and Mick
Murphy (and many others too).
Don't be fooled by any anecdotal evidence ("I ran RegFoo and had no
problems; plus, my machine was 200% faster afterwards). Sure, you may be
able to run a reg cleaner once or twice and not have your machine explode in
your face. But it is a very high risk activity. And the "200%" would not be
borne out by any objective performance measurement, it's an optical
illusion.
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au
ANY GOOD FREE REG CLEANERS FOR VISTA? 
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