Adam Albright said:
I think part of the hostility towards Registry Cleaners is once upon a
time they were garbage. Times change, things improve. Windows was once
garbage too. It's the same knock Real Player gets. It use to include
spyware and it got black listed, It hasn't for years, is still one of
the best players offering some of the best compression verses quality
you can get. Yet people hold a grudge or just are dumb and because of
it, take your pick, won't use it. ;-)
As someone who does a little programming on the side, and one who writes using windows
APIs,
let me make a comment on registry cleaners.
Yes they will find "currently unused registry entries."
Occasionally they will actually correct a registry related problem that will prevent
installation of a program.
However, keep in mind that there are lot of static registry entries that are in place to
ensure
backwards compatibility with older programs, especially when it comes to using API calls
to ordinals ( routines in DLL files )
Example, if I reference, in my application, a dll procedure from a dll that was included
with Windows 98 and that
dll has been upgraded / replaced by a newer dll in newer windows versions, the entries in
the registry will automatically point my program to the newest version of the DLL on the
machine in which the application is installed.
So, if the "base" entry has been removed from the registry, guess what, my backwards
compatible app fails to run.
So as was stated earlier in the thread, use "ANY" registry cleaner at your own risk, and
when the app you try to install
That's "supposed" to be compatible with your new windows version fails to run, don't blame
the author, restore your registry.
And yep I'm an MVP for a different technology and YEP I will include it in my sig.
--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
FP Cleaner
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/fpclean.htm
Hit Me FP
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/HitMeFP.htm