Registry Cleaning

Hello everyone; had a general thought about registry cleaning. I have reached the conclusion, as most of the skilled members on these forums have, that automatic registry cleaners are bad news. I had thought a couple were good at one point, but have found that even those that seemingly do no harm still do enough harm to cause minor issues in Windows 7.

That being said, I do find that cleaning the registry manually is necessary from time to time in Windows 7. I by no means recommend this for someone who does not understand the intricacies of the Windows 7 registry, and even though I would not consider myself an expert in this regard, I know enough to stay away from making unnecessary changes.

Basically, the only registry work I do involves uninstalling and re-installing programs that may not have installed properly the first time that cause registry errors to pop up on Windows startup due to missing links to software pieces (ahem... iTunes). Occasionally, I have had to remove registry links to run dll files left behind by virus/malware software on other people's machines. Obviously I do an extensive google search to find out which dll files are being referred to and make sure they are not software or system related. I also do a search in the computer to make sure those dll files really do not exist anywhere in the system, so deleting the registry pointer does not affect system stability.

I was wondering what others' experiences have been with manual and automatic registry cleaning. I'm very interested in learning about this regard of system optimization and startup performance. So what does everyone think?

Wishmaster said:

I do however, on occasion, run the one that built into Ccleaner. but I uncheck everything after the scan, and then manually go through the list and check/delete only what I know for a fact is a bad key.

I have seen this suggested, as well. I may do the same if I start seeing any application based errors on startup or uninstall a program that I know I won't be wanting installed again.

I have good backups of my system through system images and also restore points, so any mistakes I might make are reversible. I know Ccleaner also has the option to backup the registry before making changes. I'm careful with registry issues, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that I still can't make a blunder or two even manually fixing things.

Petey7 said:

I sometimes use the Ccleaner registry scanner but I make sure I know exactly what a each key is and what it is/was for before deciding what to do with it. On occasion I remove things from the registry myself; mostly when dealing with malware on clients computers. Sometimes the fastest way to remove malware is to look up the known files and registry keys related to the virus, remove all that I can find myself, install malwarebytes and let that finish the job.

That is good information about removing registry keys and malware files for viruses/malware. I've done some manual removal of viruses, but the viruses these days can be more sophisticated, so I typically rely on a few different tools (including Malwarebytes) for removal.