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

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mouser:
we've actually discussed this before.. and i tend to come to the same conclusion, mostly because the risk of deleting something important seems so high to me, i'd rather not take the chance..

What would be the best software to buy to fix and clean the registry for Windows XP Professional?

There's a wide variety of opinion on registry cleaners. Many people believe that they're important tools to keep your system running smoothly.

My opinion's a little different.

I rarely use a registry cleaner. In fact, I've never actually felt that I've needed to use a registry cleaner. And I definitely install and play with random things on my machine on a regular basis.

My fundamental belief is that the best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner at all. Most people simply don't need it, and don't need to run one.
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http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_best_registry_cleaner.html

Gothi[c]:
The best registry cleaner is using applications that don't use the registry, but config or ini files instead.

Eventhough Microsoft hates this, and is secretly trying to get rid of ini files.

(Who's Leo? Never saw that site. There seems to be mostly very basic stuff on there. I don't think it's a good idea to scare new users into not-fiddling-with-their-computer... after all,... how else are they going to learn stuff? ;) )

[edit] Oh he's a Microsoft employee. That explains the shield-user-from-computer stuff. :) [/edit]

Terry:
Most registry cleaner are unsafe to use for new users. I agree with mouser that there is a high risk of deleting something important. A few years ago I used a registry cleaner tool on Windows ME and it broke the OS, I have to reinstall the whole OS. I am still using a old and safe cleaner program call RegCleaner which is a freeware but no longer supported, so far no problem with it. There are also some free registry defragment and compression software that are safe to use, however avoid registry cleaner. Of course, it is important that you backup your registry and turn on system restore so that old copies of the registries can be restored.

mukestar:
Id hate to think of a third party app fiddling with my reg, especially with some of these apps doing the change without showing what its done. But i loved X-Setup from xteq (http://www.xteq.com) (i say loved, i used it before it went all pro because i pretty much knowall the keys and subkeys from over the years and didn`t really need it anymore). It a fine app , i think the pre-pro version is still avalailabe for free somewhere.

I really liked it because it was a manual process, it was in depth on what you where actually changing and it could do it in a non-destructive way as it could save the history ( that is if you didn`t totally screw up the settings and could still get your machine to boot). Oh, and it allowed you to create some really usefull scripts to share with other users.

Admitidly it wasn`t a automated registry cleaner (of course it had scripts that checked for orphaned keys and such, which basically is just what most automated cleaners do) which is can only be a good thing, as quite frankly if you dont know how to manually control the registry you shouldnt really be messing around with it. At least if your fiddling with your reg with x-setup , the interface was very intuitive and could in some instances really stop tears before bedtime.

SKA:
IMHO these two are v.good:

Regseeker 1.45 (free)  http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm
Regvac 4.02.17  (paid)   http://www.superwin.com/

SKA

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