jonm wroteSomehow I just couldn't by the statements that the problem was that I had a very unusual system that had been bollixed up by general misuse as I keep it pretty clean and have been very careful about loading software on it. Also, it's general performance hasn't been that bad.
Except for one "soapbox" post about programs you may not even have on your computer, most posts were simply expressing amazement over the large numbers of lines found by PT Registry Cleaner, with some ill-defined speculation as to cause. There's no good reason to take such comments personally.
My experience has been that the largest number of so-called errors in an uncleaned registry are items that point to files or directories that no longer exist. Most of this debris is left by windows itself.
My speculation as to cause is that you have been running stably for three years and the debris has been simply accumulating.
jonm wrote So I deided to try a different registry cleaner. I downloaded and installed Tuneup Utilities 2006. It discovered 997 errors in very short order and was able to fix them all. Comments?
1000/140000=0.7% -- based on the numbers you have reported, 99% of the debris is still in your registry.
Why did PT find so much more? Recently PT added support to find files or directories that no longer exist pointed to by entries under a UserAssist key. This may account for most of the difference.
You can test this theory with regedit by examining this key:
HKCU\Soft\MSoft\Win\CurVer\Explorer\UserAssist\{75048700-EF1F-11D0-9888-006097DEACF9}\Count\
If there are 1000s or even 10000s of lines in the right side regedit pane, most of it is probably debris. You can't tell by looking -- for some probably frivolous reason, windows has encrypted the entry name. If you want to get rid of it, one way is these steps:
1. Create a system restore point (even if you have one before you started all this).
2. Use regedit to navigate to the HKCU\Soft\MSoft\Win\CurVer\Explorer\UserAssist\ key.
3. Export it to a file for backup. (This may take "a while" -- minutes but not hours).
4. Delete the HKCU\Soft\MSoft\Win\CurVer\Explorer\UserAssist\ key. (Ditto as to time.)
Known impact? You will lose for a time the list of frequently used programs that appears when you click the windows Start button (assuming you have that feature turned on). Not to worry -- windows will start to rebuild it the next time you reboot and use the PC for a while.
Or you could just pick up where you left off here, which includes the above steps.
