Be wary of any registry cleaner. If you have a program that didn't make proper use of the registry, the registry cleaner could mark this as something to fix or remove. Result? Your application wouldn't work anymore.
Not all programs are written properly and registry cleaners have a notion to be over-zealous in getting the highest number of "errors" they need to fix. Once you hit the 'Fix all errors'-button, you could be going from a (reasonably) working system to making a recover attempt from a restore point or even re-installation of Windows in just a minute.
Personally, I haven't used a registry cleaner in years. Sorry for being harsh, but I am inclining to say that you deserve whatever misery you get into after a registry cleaning.
Your registry won't be much smaller or faster or stored more optimal on disk. Only that last item could make some (debatable) difference.
The best advice? Leave the registry alone. Better keep a tool that makes a snapshot of your system (including registry) running in the background when you install some new piece of software. Once you want to get rid of this software, use that same tool again to revert all changes this new piece of software made. This is the better way to keep your system lean and mean. I believe Comodo offers such a tool as (limited) freeware and commercially licensed.
-Shades
Well, let's call this a draw.
First, I was definitely wary. My first goal of spending a full half day on stuff I kept putting off, was that those browser hijackers had taken several steps to inject themselves into stuff, worse than I've seen in a long time. I know articles range from useful to placebo to downright "invented content horror", but the rough gist was that these thingies had registry components running around, and I think I got just about all of them.
After that, I did take a medium look at the proposed list, and big chunks of the suggested ones were items that belonged to programs that I had uninstalled. Microsoft Silverlight left behind something like thirty of them all by itself even after the official uninstall. I don't feel a rabid need to do this very often at all, but once for the first time in years myself, seemed decent enough. I don't wildly test software like I used to, so this is probably quite plenty for a long time to come.
As for your suggestion about the snapshot software, I'll take suggestions for an easy one that can modularly reverse each software's changes. I thought broadly that's what add-remove uninstall was supposed to do - but apparently it doesn't. One of the hours I spent today was stuff that was not even registering in the add-remove list, which I'm pretty fuzzy on how that happens.
So I did just grand this time, but I also don't feel I need to tempt fate much either. So I'll prob just stay here for a chunk of time as I change from more comp curiosity to life direction changes.
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