72 hour reg cleaning experiment!

[slowday444]

In the past month I had to reformat my hard drive. The idiot that I am used Unlocker to remove some leftover OpenOffice files even though windows warned me not to do so. I was unable to access the internet after the removal of the files. The really idiotic thing I had done, was keep my XP System Restore at 1% so I only had one restore point( that happened to have the unlocker command already on it), even though I had almost 70G of space free. At least I think that is what happened, all I know is that restore didn't help! Anyway, prior to that fateful day, I had noticed some of my process memory usage was off the chart, e.g. explorer.exe, some svchost.exe and WeatherPulse all 60K to 70K when normally they use teens to very low 20K or all the svchosts right now below 5K.

So after the format everything is looking good (like for three weeks) until I do some reg cleaning and up they went again. I restored and started to investigate. I cleaned the registry over the past three days with the following and then monitored: ccleaner, CM DiskCleaner, Eusing Free, MS One Care Live, Reg Cleaner, Registry Mechanic and RegSeeker. And the winner (loser) is Reg Seeker by process of elimination. All of the others have been tested and proved to be safe. I'm going to only use RegSeeker to remove specific entries after I uninstall anything. That is how I've been using it over the years, however, once in awhile I would let it scan and clean. Andavari are you out there? lol

[Andavari]

Andavari are you out there? lol

 

Interesting post! Registry cleaners can be your best friend to solve some issues, then again they can also cause some problems. And no matter how savvy one is with their Windows PC a registry cleaner can bite you when least expected!

 

Registry Mechanic is "relatively safe" due to it's ability to create dual backups with its own built-in proprietary backup that can only be restored in it, and the ability to create a System Restore point. I only use it now to scan for invalid shortcuts in my My Backups folder which saves me the trouble doing it manually, well actually I forget to do it. However I found out that Registry Mechanic is what removed my ability to have icons show on .HTML documents. I only discovered it after looking at the backup it made and noticed it removed Firefox's icon backup in the registry, and it had me perplexed for at least two days as everything I did to restore it failed in defeat, but that was my fault for not really paying attention to what it was about to remove. Good thing it makes backups!

 

The most useless, or should I state that differently; the most harmless registry cleaner I've ever used is the one in Ashampoo WinOptimizer, it hasn't found one thing.

 

RegSeeker is in my opinion almost too powerful, but then again much isn't going to get past it and it did assist in the removal of some OEM installed crapware that I'd never use.

 

I wouldn't recommend usage of RegSeeker to any novice, or better put anyone who doesn't investigate each and every thing it lists for removal, e.g.; double-click what it lists as invalid (I've stated this many times on the forums). Still though, even after letting it remove "invalid" data that seems alright to remove the backups should then immediately be looked at because sometimes it removes more than one would think and the backup would then have to be restored and that key location added into exclude.ini after a re-scan (I've also stated this many times on the forums).

 

As for Windows Live Safety Scanner/LiveOne Scanner, I don't really trust it because in my opinion it finds far too much and is on the verge of causing too much havoc to properly undo - unless reinstalling Windows is something someone charishes. The silly thing is the last time I used it what was listed in its registry cleaner would have destroyed my installation of MS Office 2003..