first off...is it necessary?

I already run Spybot and that gets rid of some registry stuff, but do I need to do those other things?  Second...is there any risk involved?  Could the program mistake a vital entry for a  trash one?  And third...whats the benefits if i DO do it?

first off...is it necessary?

Not if you reinstall every year :-) or every 6mo, or every 2 weeks. its never "nessisary" that stuff can just sit there.

I already run Spybot and that gets rid of some registry stuff, but do I need to do those other things?  Second...is there any risk involved?

somone could do more damage by cleaning thier registry with some registry cleaners than by using some of the more useless tweaks.

even the MS regclean will do damage, it did to my win98, i would guess that is why ms stopped distributing it, it would do some really stupid stuff too.

  Could the program mistake a vital entry for a  trash one? 

i havent yet seen a reg cleaner that didnt misteak some of the WEIRD entries and some not existant AT THE TIME links.  but on the other hand, they are also only FINDing suspects usually. the user is the one who makes all the misteaks  for example ME

 And third...whats the benefits if i DO do it?

a registry can be cleaned and compressed to about 2/3rds of its original size , that means it would load 30% faster, take 30% less ram, and save out 30% faster on restart.  BUT  to clean it out that much would take about 40,000% more time for the user than it would ever save.

some of them only spot very useless stuff, and are very safe.

 some of them spot stuff that is not useless at all, and if the user deletes all of them, they do some nice damage.

and NONE of them do anything about all the REST of the registry stuff that was behind and around a invalid link,  so none of them will clean up everything of a key that is completly invalid, like they may see 4 invalid subkeys, leave 12 useless subkeys, and leave the main key.

SO

if you remove something like a program, then right then go to the registry and remove that programs registry entries entirely , you could remove 75% more of that programs registry entries manually, than the cleaner would even find, you would know what you were looking for.  

BUT

the cleaner could still point to the area that the user could go look at, a valuable tool for finding areas or programs that have left stuff hanging about.

ex:  cleaner shows 3 invalid links for some epsom printer you removed 2 years ago,  you could follow those links and remove the entire sections that relate ONLY to that printer.

problem still is , you have to KNOW which is safe to remove.

Thanks for the quick, and detailed, reply.  Sounds too risky for me, though.  I've had this computer for 9-10 months now.  It has been reformatted twice (once to reinstall Win2k, another to install XP).  I guess its been 7 or so months since the last reinstall. 

I'll fiddle around with it manually, and u can bet that I'll post back for delete-verification.

Thanks alot Psyco

Steno,

I've never used Spybots registry cleaner capability, simply because in its early days, I saw more than a few threads claiming it removed some items that were needed!

However as Alan stated in another thread, none of these registry cleaners are perfectly safe. I use JV16 and read through the list, and only remove things that I have some knowledge on. Usually this means getting rid of only about half or less of what the program finds, which would seem to defeat the purpose of using it to begin with!!!

So there is always risk!

The benefit is, a cleaner more compact and supposedly faster reg file.

I wonder though if this is really true, or one of those opinions left over from earlier days of less powerful and slower computers.

I'd like to see some opinions on this from Relder and MNO, or some of the other more professional guys.

O yea, BTW- where do I look to delete the keys of  uninstalled programs? classes_root?, current_user?, local_machine?, users?, or current_config?

Theres tons of folders/subfolders and I dont know where to begin.

O yea, BTW- where do I look to delete the keys of  uninstalled programs? classes_root?, current_user?, local_machine?, users?, or current_config?

Theres tons of folders/subfolders and I dont know where to begin.

[/QUOTE]

places called SOFTWARE first, then you aquire a few Names from thier entries in software.

then

search for the program name, the name of its executables, and the company name that makes it, or distributed it. 

Ok, now, I found an entry of a program I deleted a while ago.  Do i just delete the whole folder?

And under Software/Blizzard Entertainment/ theres DiabloII and Warcraft3 ...if I delete the WC3 folder will everythin else be OK?

this is too hard already...lol

Steno,

This will probably convince you to say, "THE HELL WITH IT!!"

Heres what I do.

Start at the top of the registry.

Do a find for the program name,

i.e.          virus scan if it finds a key, delete it. Click find next, etc.

Than begin again,

Company name      macafee            same as above

Than parent company name    network associates  same as above

And you probably, still wont get them all!!!  Arghhh

If only these people would writ good uninstallers!!