orphaned dll's?

[Ed Chait]

Does anyone have any recommendations on a freeware program that will help me
find and delete orphaned dll's?

Preferably one that will not hose my system.

ed

 

[Leo R.]

Does anyone have any recommendations on a freeware program that will help me
find and delete orphaned dll's?

Preferably one that will not hose my system.

ed

Hi Ed, DLL Archiver
Came across this a few days ago. I have run it a couple of times. First time
it found a few, second time none. Good thing about it is that you can
archive them until you decide they are really not needed and if so they are
easy to restore.

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/dllarch.htm
This is some blurb from their site.
Everyone has uninstalled programs at one point or another, just
to be presented with that wonderful dialog asking whether or not we
want to delete some 'shared' Windows resource... Do we? Does something
else use that DLL file it's asking about? Help!!! That's where AnalogX
DLL Archive comes in - it searches through all the files on your
system and lets you know if any of them contain references to the
DLL's in question!
AnalogX DLL Archive is super-simple to use, just click search
and let it do it's thing - once done, you'll be presented with a
list of all the DLL's that don't have references in the system!
Then just select which ones you think aren't necessary anymore
and archive them; it's that simple! Make a mistake? No problem,
restoring DLL's from the archive is just as simple - nothing is
deleted until YOU delete it.

 

[Ed Chait]

help

Hi Ed, DLL Archiver
Came across this a few days ago. I have run it a couple of times. First time
it found a few, second time none. Good thing about it is that you can
archive them until you decide they are really not needed and if so they are
easy to restore.

Thanks Leo,

I downloaded it and it works fine.

ed

 

[jo]

Does anyone have any recommendations on a freeware program that will help me
find and delete orphaned dll's?

Preferably one that will not hose my system.

ed

For W98, Google for: solway clean system directory

 

[Hello]

Thanks Leo,

I downloaded it and it works fine.

Be careful with this one. Analogx makes great stuff, and they wotrk as
advertised. Just don't delete thedlls until youare sure you do not
need them



G < speaking as a guy who hosed his system with this one>

--

 

[Anti_Freak_Machine]

Be careful with this one. Analogx makes great stuff, and they wotrk as
advertised. Just don't delete thedlls until youare sure you do not
need them



G < speaking as a guy who hosed his system with this one>

Heh. Last night I gave this a shot and as soon as I had it quarantine a
bunch off DLLs Windows popped up a warning telling me that system dlls
were missing. I had to unarchive all the dlls because I wasn't sure
which were needed.

 

[jo]

Heh. Last night I gave this a shot and as soon as I had it quarantine a
bunch off DLLs Windows popped up a warning telling me that system dlls
were missing. I had to unarchive all the dlls because I wasn't sure
which were needed.

Hee hee... last night I quarantined 30 dll's at 'clean system
directory's' suggestion.
No probs at all.
So far.

 

[Roy]

Be careful with this one. Analogx makes great stuff, and they wotrk as
advertised. Just don't delete thedlls until youare sure you do not
need them

I agree.

I thought I'd give this a whirl to see what it would find/do. It claimed to
find over four hundred unneeded dlls for deletion, which might be possible
I suppose, given the total number of such files it found.

I decided to try archiving half a dozen to see results, changed my mind,
and attempted to restore them. Mainly successful, but one remained which
could not be restored - apparently. I searched in Windows/System32 from
which it had been removed, and sure enough it was still there, and its
properties clearly showed it was owned by Nvidia, which I had suspected,
despite DLLArchive having claimed that no such information regarding it was
available during its search. There was also a renamed copy of the same file
in the DLLArchive folder.

It's quite possible that this particular Nvidia dll is no longer required,
following an update, but this behaviour does not inspire confidence.
Proceed with caution.

Cheers,

Roy

 

[Bill Turner]

Be careful with this one. Analogx makes great stuff, and they wotrk as
advertised. Just don't delete thedlls until youare sure you do not
need them

_________________________________________________________

I used it on my system, cleaned out a bunch of .dll files and the next
time I booted up, it asked me for a password, which it had never done
before. So much for "unused" .dlls. I used the restore function,
bootup was back to normal, and I uninstalled the dll remover.

No thanks, I don't need the extra 44 megs that bad.

 

[Ed Chait]

For W98, Google for: solway clean system directory

Yep, I'm running W98. Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.

ed

 

[Ed Chait]

Be careful with this one. Analogx makes great stuff, and they wotrk as
advertised. Just don't delete thedlls until youare sure you do not
need them



G < speaking as a guy who hosed his system with this one>

Well, it installed fine. When I ran it, it found "0" orphaned dll's, which
I find hard to believe, since this is a 4 year old pc that I have
installed/uninstalled tons of programs on.

I know to be very cautious when deleting "orphaned" dll's, but it didn't
find any!

I'm going to try the program jo suggested also.

thanks,

ed

 

[Semolina Pilchard]

Does anyone have any recommendations on a freeware program that will help me
find and delete orphaned dll's?

Preferably one that will not hose my system.

Unless there's a desperate need for disk space, I question the value
of this type of program. Orphaned .dlls are just so much ghost code.
Nothing calls them; they do nothing except use up a small amount of
space. Getting rid of them does not benefit you in any way other than
the recovered disk space.

When hard disks were smaller and space more at a premium, I did use
one of these programs. It moved the orphaned .dlls to a temporary
directory and the recommendation was they be left there until the user
was sure they were not actually needed. They never were, but I don't
remember ever being confident enough to delete them, so the net gain
was nil. It does seem to me that the possibility of damaging error
outweighs the minimal benefit.

 

[Ed Chait]

Unless there's a desperate need for disk space, I question the value
of this type of program. Orphaned .dlls are just so much ghost code.
Nothing calls them; they do nothing except use up a small amount of
space. Getting rid of them does not benefit you in any way other than
the recovered disk space.

When hard disks were smaller and space more at a premium, I did use
one of these programs. It moved the orphaned .dlls to a temporary
directory and the recommendation was they be left there until the user
was sure they were not actually needed. They never were, but I don't
remember ever being confident enough to delete them, so the net gain
was nil. It does seem to me that the possibility of damaging error
outweighs the minimal benefit.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I agree.

I tend to be compulsive and obsessive about cleaning out unused files, but
in this case, I think you are absolutely correct.

The risk outweighs the benefit.

Regards,

ed

 

[sue sanchez]

I archived "unused" dll's with AnalogX DLL Archive and immediately
began to receive error messages from Windows XP Home SP2 that vital
files were missing and to insert my Windows CD.