Registry Cleaner?

[Mike Stevens]

Is there a MS sanctioned registry cleaner, something similar to what
symantec has? This would be for a windows 2000 server PDC, running all the
goodies (ISA, Exchange, IIS, SQL, Etc....) if that makes any difference.

Thanks

Mike

 

[Bob I]

The only one that I am aware of (Regclean) was pulled. Some folks swear
by them and some folks swear at them.

 

[G]

Microsoft had a RegClean utility that came on the VB4 Dev Studio CD, IIRC,
and was available on their web site. Googling microsoft.com for regclean is
instructive, as there are articles on products with which it is
incompatible. There are of course 3rd party utilities, and googling the web
for regclean should help you find a few of them.

Since this is your PDC, running Exchange and other things you probably do
not want to go without, you have to weigh the benefits of cleaning your
registry with the risks of breaking something else on this system, and
having to recover from that. Presumably, something is not working as you
would like it to, and you suspect that the problem is garbage in your
registry. It might be more prudent to start with the symptoms, and see if
the denizens of this forum can help you alleviate the problems you see. As
they say, first, do no harm.

Greg Stigers, MCSA
this space for rent

 

[Jim Byrd]

Hi Mike - My 2 cents, FWIW. In my experience all of these Reg cleaners,
even the best, are fraught with
danger. I advise against using them except in one specific instance, that
is when you have one that is capable of doing specific Reg searches, and
you NEED (not just WANT) to remove the remaining traces of something that
didn't get uninstalled correctly. (and you didn't have foresight enough to
install it using Total Uninstall,
http://www.geocities.com/ggmartau/projects/projects.html, in the first
place.)

Lastly, if you must screw around with your Registry, then at least get
Erunt/Erdnt, and run it before you do the Reg clean. You'll then have a
true restore available to you. Read below to see why you might not just
using the Reg cleaner's restore:

Get Erunt here for all NT-based computers including XP:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/index.htm I've set it up to
take a scheduled backup each night at 12:01AM on a weekly round-robin basis,
and a Monthly on the 1st of each month. See here for how to set that up:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/erunt.txt, and for some
useful information about this subject.

This program is one of the best things around - saved my butt on many
occasions, and will also run very nicely from a DOS prompt (in case you've
done something that won't let you boot any more and need to revert to a
previous Registry) IF you're FAT32 OR have a DOS startup disk with NTFS
write drivers in an NTFS system. (There is also a way using the Recovery
Console to get back to being "bootable" even without separate DOS write NTFS
drivers, after which you can do a "normal" Erdnt restore.) (BTW, it also
includes a Registry defragger program). Free, and very, very highly
recommended.

FYI, quoting from the above document:

Note: The "Export registry" function in Regedit is USELESS (!) to make a
complete backup of the registry. Neither does it export the whole registry
(for example, no information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can the
exported file be used later to replace the current registry with the old
one. Instead, if you re-import the file, it is
merged with the current registry, leaving you with an absolute mess of old
and new registry keys.


--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



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