[Davey7549]

Many of you know or have experienced the problems that can occur using registry cleaners. Personally I advocate minimum use. Here is an analysis informally done by one of the creators of two such programs. What lends credibility to the study is the ability to download the test criteria or create your own test criteria and see if the cleaners are able to find it. In short run your own tests. Based on this individuals tests and that of others there are very few cleaners that do not fail by detecting valid entries and displaying them as invalid. Another note here is many cleaners find a very small percentage of the invalid entries and some none at all.
Stressed in the article is a statement "If one valid entry is found and displayed as invalid, this is bad". How true that is since that one valid entry shown as invalid may be the you removed and had to reinstall the OS or another piece of software.
http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/registry_test.shtml

Dave

Note: As stated before I am not an advocate of registry cleaners especially when used by someone with limited registry experience. If you feel you must use a registry cleaner then always protect yourself by creating a registry backup before any cleaning is done and for those of you with System Restore capabilities make sure your restore function is in proper working order and create a restore point before using cleaner.

[buckaroo]

What an interesting link......I had no idea! I have Norton's CleanSweep and do use the registry cleaner. I also always save the backups just in case. I found it interesting that in the test the Norton Utilities didn't find any incorrect keys but at least didn't flag any valid keys as incorrect. Makes one think twice about registry cleaners, doesn't it?

Thanks Dave for a really informative post.