Take you own advice in the very first sentence and you will not go wrong.

It is $30, what will you gain? Sales pitches are just sales pitches with the intent of removing your money from you to them.

If you really must clean your registry - and you do not need to do that - then use the free RegSeeker. But know what you are doing.

"Most notably, critics say there is no reliable way for a third party program to know whether any particular key is invalid, redundant or neither. Poorly designed registry cleaners may not know for sure whether a key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have. This has led to examples of registry cleaners causing loss of functionality and/or system instability."

I am not recommending that you do this as I always feel the use of a registry cleaning utility is best left up to the user.

If you find a deep desire to use a registry cleaner CCleaner has a built in tool which is multi-step. It first scans the HD, reports the findings, allows you to select the entries you wish to remove, and finally the most important feature is the ability to create a backup. Just before you begin read the Help so as you know how to restore the backup.

If you do use the tool and if you select the option to "fix" all the entries, after the process is complete rerun CC. There is a possibility CC will find more entries. (I used it on a system one time that required three scans) When you create the second, or perhaps more, you will have to rename the offered file name. I generally just add an a tnen a b and so on.

Again user beware.

DA

I personally always strongly advise against the use of registry cleaners by anyone other than a registry specialist and will provide links from some of the Microsoft MVP's with some very good points and arguments they make.
AUMHA Discussion: Should I Use a Registry Cleaner?
a very good compilation put together by Bill Castner

Help! My computer is slow!
by MVP Miekiemoes

and from Ed Bott
Why I donÂt use registry cleaners

When I continue to see the most knowledgeable people stating they do not use registry cleaners and do not advise the use of them I follow suit.

I was on the phone yesterday with a Dell tech person. My DVD-R drive isn't working. After him doing everything he could to burn a disc he started checking other stuff in my computer. One of the tools he used was Uniblue Reg Booster. It found over 375 reg errors.

Never did get my DVD-R fixed, I'm now waiting for a tech to call and set up an appointment to install an new optical somethingorother.... Glad I have a 4 yr warranty.

Dell XPS300 XP sp3 2 1/2 yrs old (just for your info)
Nancy

"On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing. Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner. Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability. A safer and more measurable approach to Registry performance is to defragment the Registry files using a Microsoft-supported tool such as PageDefrag."

Here is a link that might be useful: Information above taken from here.

Nancy, 375 errors is a reasonable number to find if it has not been done for a long time. Probably none of them had any detrimental effect on the running of your machine though.

Recently I cleaned a computer with over 1,000 errors. These are mostly redundant fragments left by poorly written uninstall programs etc

Your repairman will no doubt just replace the actual DVD burner for you.

Thanks, everyone. After reading all of your comments and the articles provided, I've decided to let well enough alone. My computer is running fine, so I'll leave the registry as is, doing only my normal maintenance routine and hope that all stays fine.

Thanks again. Y'all are great!

Dee

Good idea,

A broken registry is a broken Windows.

Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner... their Full scan does some registry cleaning. It usually finds ActiveX and class id' errors on mine ... Should be safe for most computers.. Not an aggressive thing.

Here is a link that might be useful: Live OneCare Safety Scanner

I though Micorsoft was phasing out Windows Live One Care.

Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft-to-Phase-Out-Windows-Live-OneCare

OneCar - will be replaced with a new improved version, a different name.

Here is a link that might be useful: OneCare to become OnceCared

Thanks