Registry Scanner/Cleaner

Not sure I want to recommend a particular one in case I get blamed for what it does , but just to say I have used various ones in the past. The final screen showing all that's been fixed was really pleasing to see; but I am unconvinced that the response changed, at least significantly.

I say the following knowing I never bother myself, but the best activity is probably to scrub the hard drive and reinstall the OS, its patches, and required applications from scratch on a regular basis. That way you start with a "clean" registry each time.

Alternatively put up with its speed until it's time to upgrade the PC anyway.

I was going to post this exact question... I know nothing about the registry stuff but I have used crap cleaner in the past. It has never appeared to have done anything malicious to my system.

If someone knows of a good reg cleaner, if you have to pay for it or not, please advise. Thx!!

I use the Uniblue power suite.
It does registry cleaning, compaction and defrag
It has not caused me any troubles and as far as aggressiveness it is probably middle of the road. On my first scan it found 2-300 items.
It also offers a decent amount of settings to control what it scans for eg. usage tracks, bad uninstalls etc.

The suite also comes with Spy Eraser that I use in addition to Spybot and Avast AV on both XP and Vista and I cant remember the last time i had any trouble. All 3 of these progs offer regular updates and definitions and have the lowest overhead compared to the many other progs I have tried.

The suite also comes with a prog called Speed Up My PC that will optimize many settings but I havent really used it and cant offer any real numbers concerning its effectiveness.

This computer has 2 teenagers on it all of the time so you can guess the places they go and the challenges the program faces.

It isnt a free package but it isnt expensive either. With a little searching though you should be able to find it at a greatly reduced price

The best advice to give though is get a ghosting program and use it once a month. Especially after a brand new fresh install when all service packs and up to date drivers are in. Put the image on a seperate partition or drive and if things get out of control reload the image and presto zingo zoppo its all new again.