I'm a fan of resupreme pro - works very well for me, and never once messed up any of my systems.

[edit: otherwise known as regsupreme pro as John pointed out - from macecraft] lol

I'm a fan of resupreme pro - works very well for me, and never once messed up any of my systems.
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I assume you meant Re(g)Supreme Pro Ken. Is that right?

John

I use System Mechanic 7 from Iolo Technologies. The program used to be a pain in the ass, with very annoying pop ups and way too frequent updates. Version 7 seems to have a lot of those "bugs" worked out.

Patrick

I use Tweaknow Regcleaner Std too. Have used it on many computers. Never a problem and cleans things up nicely.

Crap Cleaner fried my system probably because I got over zealous with it without understanding all the settings. I had to reinstall an old C:\ image.

You should ask yourself, "Do I really need a registry cleaner?" The amount of stuff that they remove is trivial, when compared to the overall size of the registry these days and there is some associated risk with their use.

"Crap Cleaner fried my system probably because I got over zealous with it without understanding all the settings. I had to reinstall an old C:\ image." Well........ I assume you just let it get rid of all the useless crap and it got rid of MS, a major source of crap (sometimes) ;-) Maybe we should email copies of Crap Cleaner to Redmond and see if MS survives ;-)

I would caution users to do an image of their system before trying any registry cleaner, because there is a chance you will screw up something. What's worse is that the screwup may not be obvious at first. For example, you go to run Outlook one day and notice you no longer have access to your "Deleted" folder. Stuff like that.

That said, I've had success with several cleaners, including the Iolo one and the one bundled with Norton's Cleansweep.

"Crap Cleaner fried my system probably because I got over zealous with it without understanding all the settings. I had to reinstall an old C:\ image." Well........ I assume you just let it get rid of all the useless crap and it got rid of MS, a major source of crap (sometimes) ;-) Maybe we should email copies of Crap Cleaner to Redmond and see if MS survives ;-)
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LOL......I love it.

John

I use the free CCleaner. It is great for junk files and very MILD acting for the registry so little chance of damage and is fully reversible.

As far as I know, none of these programs will remove the stuff that stops clean installs that we really need. For example, if you want to run a really clean install of Nero you must get from Nero their "Nero Clean Tool" - no reg-cleaner I have found has ever done for Nero what the Nero toll does.

I agree with several of the previous posts about whether you even need a registry cleaner. I used to be hung up about his, back in the early Windows days. Used Cleansweep (from Quarterdeck, later Symantec) and others.

But then I realized that nothing really changed after doing the cleaning. I couldn't detect or measure the slightest performance improvement, and as others pointed out, the percentage decrease in the size of the registry file was trivial.

And, like others have pointed out, if you remove the wrong registry entries -- which I have done -- really bad things happen.

So, I long ago quit worrying about this. I don't think it will improve performance or stability by any detectable measure. Like disk defragmentation, which I think is almost as useless an exercise, I keep looking for some objective third-party measurement that shows some improvement from doing the cleanup. I've never seen such a thing, so I suspect there isn't any improvement. None that I've ever measured, that's for sure.

The things I like about them:

a) detection of broken links - can be useful, for things such as codecs
b) removal of some of the more buried cack - for example, if I remove an app, I can remove traces of it manually - but will more than likely not see the GUID desribed versions

I would be careful. I was using Registry Mechanic a while back and I could not start some of the Sony programs after I had redownloaded them i.e after an update was available. I finally called Sony Support, we got rid of Registry Mechanic and I have not had a problem since

I also agree with you on disk defragmentation software, with a minor exception. Defragging made some sense when HDDs were much smaller. However, if your HDD is almost full, a good defrag might allow to recover some lost disk speed, using it after some good housekeeping to rid yourself of useless files that are never used. But HDDs are so cheap these days, you really should just add another/bigger one.

I run Registry Mechanic. I have never had a problem.....that I know of! Maybe the system problems people have are actually due to registry cleaners and not MS.........naaah.