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What's the best registry cleaner? Ask Leo says: none

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f0dder:
Getting rid of even one tedious housekeeping exercise (i.e., registry "cleaning") would be beneficial, and I certainly would not want to continue doing it if it actually increased risks, as you seem to be suggesting.-IainB (August 17, 2012, 05:57 AM)
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It might not be a very large risk, when you use a cleaner that isn't overly aggressive - in that case, it's just a case of not really gaining anything, plus the (slightly theoretical) argument that it's more risk doing changes than not doing them.

As for why registry cleaning doesn't gain you much (apart from some situations where software has actually broken stuff), there's two points:
1) you won't gain a lot of disk space. On my work laptop, my current user hive is 7 megabytes... that's a drop in the ocean on today's harddrives. Besides, if you compact the hive, adding new nodes will cause file fragmentation, whereas while not shrinking internal slack space can possibly be re-used.
2) node lookups are pretty darn efficient. Iirc, it uses a binary tree structure, so node lookups are fast, even if there's a huge amount of them. (OK, you can gain some speed on during full-registry searches, but that's not a very typical usecase :)).

Stoic Joker:
Registry cleaners remove things that are (perceived as not being necessary) not being used. The problem is many of these items are imperative for things that one frequently needs later. I'd say that easily 80% of the times I've worked a call where a .NET based business application install/update went down in flames were directly caused by someone there deciding to "Tidy-up" a bit with a registry cleaner.

Registry cleaning is best compared to garage cleaning ... Sure the place sparkles when you're done, but... You typically end up needing something you threw out about a month later.

Curt:
http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/are-systemregistry-cleaners-worthwhile/

The Top Story: "Are system/Registry cleaners worthwhile?" (spoiler: surprisingly one of them is!)


Are system/Registry cleaners worthwhile?
By Fred Langa on July 15, 2015 in Top Story   

As Windows and third-party software have evolved over the years, Windows Secrets has periodically put various Registry- and system-cleanup products through their paces to examine the claims made by and about them.

For example, most cleanup software claims to streamline and shrink the Registry by removing obsolete, erroneous data and broken links stored there. Other products claim to do more, such as removing junk files, reducing boot times, and improving overall system performance.

Back in the days of Windows XP, third-party system cleaners were of real value in removing detritus from the operating system. But the current versions of Windows have many more built-in tuning and self-repair options. So do third-party cleaners still deliver any real-world benefit? Do they live up to their impressive claims?-Windows Secrets
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conclusionsIf you follow the recommendations in ##those articles##, then your PC will most likely also be lean, clean, and running well — without the assistance of any third-party cleaning tool.

A second related takeaway from these tests: If your PC is at all healthy, it’s unlikely you’ll see miraculous results from any commercial cleaning tool — and certainly no “47 percent faster boot times.”

My third and final takeaway: I’ll continue using — and recommending — lightweight tools such as CCleaner for routine cleanups. As mentioned earlier, this test (one cycle of software setup and knockdown on already-clean systems) didn’t leave a lot to clean up. But each cycle of software installs, upgrades, and uninstalls leaves behind some digital debris. Over time, it adds up and can become a significant source of slowdowns and clutter.

These tests tend to confirm that the manual cleaning methods mentioned above, plus lightweight cleaning from third-party tools such as CCleaner, might be all you need to keep a PC operating at or near best-available levels of performance.

I also worry about over-cleaning. I have to wonder about the high fault numbers reported by jv16 PowerTools X and Advanced SystemCare and what the two products are actually cleaning. (In some cases, the cure might be worse than the disease.)(...)


It's summer, so the article is a cook-up from their articles last August.
http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/are-systemregistry-cleaners-worthwhile/

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