We have been using CCleaner in our firm for some time now - as one of several Scheduled Tasks for cleaning and maintenance. Wonderful tool!!!

I have tried several different Registry cleaners with varying degrees of successes and disasters. CCleaner's registry cleaning has yet to create any problems compared to some other cleaners. However, some other cleaners do provide deeper cleaning - that is still on the safe side.

I would like to see some development effort expended on deeper registry cleaning options. Options that present unquestionably safe deletions for those folks who are not registry geeks and other options that are "safe" in that they don't damage core Windows components but do offer greater cleaning/removal for software/hardware that is clearly no longer present on the system. This should include CLSID entries as well as Control Set entries if at all possible.

However, cleaning of core Windows components is not necessary. From my point of view, there is no need for registry cleaning of core Windows components as the performance returns typically do not exceed the risks of damaging the Windows installation. Further, there are few folks that are knowledgable enough in Windows registry entries to be able to discern what would be a safe entry to delete.

As long as core components are not at risk then any software installation whose keys may not have been correctly identified as safe to remove can be reinstalled.

This would be the next "big" thing that CCleaner could offer.

Check out my topic Typelib entries left after CLSID's cleaned in the Bugs Forum.

I touch upon the relationships between the Registry entries ProgIDs (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT), CLSIDS, TypeLibs and Interface sections. I have written a program (really sloppy - but does a good analysis work) that 'marries' all this information up into a report and allows you to fix it. But it is really for experience registry administrators, since you must check/double-check that all the findings are right.

I had also created a program that permitted administrators to repair invalid pathnames in the registry. It was very rudimentary, in that it basically found invalid pathnames and then proceeded to search the volumes to verify if they had been moved. If a match was met, the pathname was modified. This came in handy when you moved any entire folder tree (e.g. Program Files folders) and kept everything the same as far as pathnames. In that case, just the drive letter needed to be modified in the registry. It also fixed problems when servers were moved and names where modified. Yada yada yada!

Check out my topic. You idea of advancing to ControlSet is interesting. I've also considered verifying HKLM\Software entries and HKU cleanups using the new Load Hive feature for each user on the system.

All these could be incorporated in CCleaner in the future, depending on the effort involved.

that link is wrong..some how it goes to Microsoft. whats up with that?

does anybody else notice that how is just me?...**scratching head in confusion**

Correct Link:
http://forum.ccleaner.com/index.php?showtopic=4432

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Registry cleaning programs can border on playing it perhaps a bit too safe and not finding anything in the registry at all (yes there are those that aren't even up to par with CCleaner's safe registry cleaner), or being a total disaster that needs to have a large amount of exclusions.

The most important thing for users that do go the route of a more powerful registry cleaner is to make sure they've backed up their registry beforehand (System Restore, ERUNT, WinRescue) before ever trusting the backup a registry cleaning program does.