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A registry cleaner is a type of software utility designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system whose purpose is to remove redundant or unwanted items from the Windows registry. However the necessity and usefulness of registry cleaners is a controversial topic, with experts not agreeing on their benefit. The problem is further clouded by the fact that malware and scareware is often associated with utilities of this type.
Purpose:
Registry Cleaners are software utilities that attempt to remove configuration data from the Windows Registry that is no longer in use or that is unwanted on the system. Such data may include information left by software that has not been uninstalled completely from the computer, information that is no longer of use, or settings required for the operation of malware. A registry cleaner scans the registry, and attempts to pick out the unnecessary values in order to delete or repair them.
Advantages:
Registry cleaners, or registry cleanup software, may improve the performance of computers by ridding the registry of redundant information.
Due to the sheer size and complexity of the registry database, manually cleaning up debris and invalid entries would be impractical, so registry cleaners are essentially tools that automate the process of looking for invalid entries, missing file references or broken links within the registry and resolving them.
The correction of an invalid registry key can provide some benefits.For example, on older versions of Windows, a registry entry indicating a program should be run at startup from a network path that no longer exists can delay startup by as long as the network protocol takes to timeout. (Note: A registry cleaner is not required to correct this, as free tools such as AutoRuns from Sysinternals (now Microsoft) can resolve this issue.[1])
Noted Windows architecture expert has concluded that registry cleaners will continue to have a role until most applications have moved to the .NET Framework platform that does not rely on the registry for application settings.
Some registry cleaners offer backup and restore functions that allow the user to revert changes made by the registry cleaner in case they are undesired. A registry cleaner may be useful for someone that adds or removes programs from their computer very often; however, a virtual machine is a faster and more reliable means of reverting an operating system to a previous good known state in a testing scenario.
Registry damage:
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,as well as application compatibility updates from Microsoft to block problematic Registry cleaners.
Recovery capability:
A Registry cleaner cannot repair a Registry hive that can’t be mounted by the system. However a corrupt registry can be recovered in a number of ways that are supported by Microsoft (e.g. Automated System Recovery, from a “Last Known Good” boot menu, by re-running setup or by using System Restore).
Malware removal:
Registry cleaners are not specialized malware removal utilities, and therefore are not equipped to deal with complex scenarios where malware such as spyware, adware and viruses can re-infect a computer through multiple infection vectors, where removal results in system instability or infection of the tool itself.
A registry cleaner cannot detect or remove registry entries associated with a rootkit, which will hide this information from other processes. A specialized tool such as RootkitRevealer is required to compare the results returned by Registry API’s against the raw underlying registry storage.
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