Registry cleaner

It may be very time consuming and perhaps a bit hazardous if one is not careful and makes a mistake, but one can edit the registry manually by opening "regedit" and and using the Find function in the Edit Menu for deleting the unwanted entries. In fact it is the best way to delete the orphaned entries left behind by programs that have been uninstalled.

I do it all the time but yesterday I carried out an experiment with the following results. I uninstalled the KMPlayer. Than ran Ccleaner which found 17 KMPlayer related orphans. Then ran jv16 PowerTools 2011 (my favourite) which found 32. After that I manually removed 87 KMPlayer related orphans in the Registry. Then I ran both the registry cleaners again and they were unable to find a single orphan.

This method also ensures the rigorous following of kado897's advise that, "whatever you do you must look very carefully at any registry changes it suggests".

Ask Leo...

Registry Cleaner

As you may already know, I'm not a huge fan of registry cleaners. In general, the risk is too high and the benefits are typically miniscule. Unless there's a specific problem that you're attempting to solve, I suggest not using a general purpose registry cleaner ... ever.
That being said, if you feel you must, CCleaner's registry cleaner is a reasonable choice.


Note: After you scan for issues, there will almost always be issues. Even on my machine - which is working just great - CCleaner has listed over 200 "issues" that it would clean up for me, if allowed.
I'm not going to clean them, as cleaning them would give me no appreciable benefit.
If you do elect to "Fix selected issues...", CCleaner will prompt you to backup the registry first, which I recommend that you do, of course.

CCleaner - Windows Cleaning Tool