Dermot said:
Thanks Shenan. I agree totally with your reply especially about
some of the third party reg cleaners which I think are downright
dangerous. I still find it interesting to see MS WLS providing this
reg cleaner now though, which kinda runs contrary to the advice of
a lot of other MPVs on this forum. Anyway back to my original
question or perhaps it is difficult to be totally definitive about
this I dont know. Are entries with no default value not doing
anything and therefore safe to delete or is there potential for a
value to be set at some stage and therefore the entry should be
left alone. It is unclear from my attempts on Google etc....
As the default value is unset I assume no particular programme
depends on the entry or am I mistaken? By the way I also use CC
which is a great program.
The "default" key.. well - I shouldn't say "the" - as they can be found in
dozens/hundreds of places in the registry... can either mean something or
not. It could have been just put there by the application's programmers or
it might be set at some future date by a program. It's hard to say.
In most cases - it is probably okay to delete these empty keys - unless they
have special permissions on them allowing all users to change them as
opposed to the default permissions that may prevent a regular user to create
a key there and change it as needed.
In other words - if your computer is only used by you and you are the
administrator - erasing such a key would probably only result in it being
recreated as needed. If you have other users on the system - particularly
ones with less rights (or you use your system as suggested - as a regular
user) then deleting these values could come back to bite you due to possible
permissions that were set special to allow for such regular users to
utilize.
Rule of thumb with the registry... If it makes you nervous to do it - like
getting no definitive answer - don't do it on a production system.
