its a powerful regcleaner first time its used it seems to do a good job it will find hundreds of invalid entries, but everytime you run it even after you just ran it! it will continously find more invalid entries. what it finds is alot of false positives and and since it cleans up the registry of any in its eyes dead entries it finds, eventually it screws up your registry by mainly deleting uninstalls for programs you have that it sees as inactive and left over entries, other things it does is any empty key it will delete, eventually it will mess up your system to the point where your system will run as normal but some programs you won’t be able to uninstall or uninstall properly whenever you goto update them, there is more ■■■■ it does, and no program is safe from it, so thats my word of warning, avoid RegCure
Thanks for the heads up Reg, i’ve been using Regcure for some time now and have never noticed a problem ( i run it once everyday and my system has never seemed to run smoother).
Do you advocate not using this sort of program? and if not what do you recommend as an alternative program?
Its possible, yet once it cleans up some reg entries, wouldnt that invalidate some other reg entries that relied on the old invalid entries? The registry is quite sensitive, and if it was messing it up you would notice immediate results. However it is great you brought this up For this matter do not use ANY registry cleaner in my opinion, just as I said the registry is quite sensitive and it should be left alone. O.o
if your quite experienced with using it and you tend to select to omit entries it finds in it to ignore them, then you should be farily safe. I was using RegCure for about 2 - 3 weeks, and I was running it once or twice a day almost since i was installing alot of software and performing alot of updates. and then i noticed the nvidia systemtray icon had disappeared and there was no way I could get it back, so i went to uinstall my driver display and reinstall it, but then it wouldn’t fully install and gave a null uinstall entry :-\
i discovered Regcure had corrupted a few of my uninstalls for some programs and the entries for their icons that starts up in systemtray. it did that for my nvidia systemtray icon and my printer controlpanel systemtray icon, the latter i was able to fix. the former I cannot fix with a uninstall and reinstall, because then any regcleaner i run afterwards removes the nvidia icon from my systemtray. I had notived that regcure would list alot of entries for my nvidia systemtray icon in entries it found and it would remove them. I had ccleaner for a month and that never gave me problems, so i can only pinpoint to it being RegCure that corrupted some reigstry keys for certain programs i had and more annoying the uninstall reg keys for them.
It would be safer having a registry with a bit of bloated redundant entries than one where vital keys gets deleted :-\ and CCleaner seems alot safer it might not be as through as Regcure but atleast its alot safer.
if your comfortable with Regcure and it hasn’t cause you any problems then hopefully it never does my warning was more to those who are not comfortable with cleaning the registry and may have never used RegCure or are new to it, for them it is far better sticking to something like CCleaner which alot of people use and seems popular and is alot safer to use, I did remove Regcure and am just using CCleaner on its own now. could be my those registry keys got corrupted from using two regcleaners instead of solely one :-, but i know which one i feel alot safer using now
quite possible Info-Sec
although with Regcure i would look at some of the entries it would find, not all since it would list hundreds of entries even though I was using it everyday, the first time i ran it it found 1200 some odd entries to remove and this is when I was using CCleaner so my regitrsy was already cleaned up of whatever junk entries CCleaner found, generally i would manually clean up my registry using Regedit of programs i uninstalled and wasn’t upgrading them. i knew what keys to delete and it was keys for programs and not for drivers or anything, and i never had a problem.
then i decided to try Regcure after reading some review from ppl who rated it well on a download site, and what i found quite odd is it would keep finding so many reg entries to delete if I ran it right after it already found entries and cleaned them. it is quite a powerful regcleaner, unfortunately though it isn’t as safe as the the less powerful but popular ones like CCleaner.
don’t get me wrong Regcleaner didn’t ■■■■■■ up my system in anyway to stop it performing, but now i am missing some important things, well only one i am missing that i couldn’t find a fix around for and thats my systemtry icon for my nvidia displayall its necessay entries and reg hook keys are gone :S lol and the only choice i have it to either do a fresh winxp install which I really don’t want to when my system is working fine or just live with it.
i could only recommend RegCure to those who are quite used to editing the registry and they are the type who go through what entries are found and choose what keys to omit from being cleaned, which with Regcure isn’t easy knowing what keys is exactly what since it only lists the regkey string and never lists and folders paths, I never omitted anything it found in it.
with so much talk in the firewall section of the forum about using regcleaners when cfp 3 cameout, i thought it might be good warning ppl about RegCure, if they want to try it then do backup the registry and would be good if they have a backup image of their system, then have a through check to make sure everything is still fine and one hassle though is how will they know if any uninstall reg keys for any software or driver is corrupted? they won’t unless they can keep a backup of their registry for a month or so and never make any changes lol
so Regcure is something to be aware of and its needless for anyone whose not used it to try it out, is better to be safer than sorry.
and true one should generally leave the registry alone, but i’ve been tweaking my registry since the win95 days lol, its only when i use such a powerful and unsafe registry cleaner program that i ever end up with some keys gone that shouldn’t be and things not exactly the same after than they was before lol. I remember Regclean 1. 4 i think it was, i can’t remember exactly but that too if i can recall was quite dangerous in using to clean up the registry as it would list keys that if one knew what they meant then they would know if shouldn’t be touched and a regcleaner program should know that too if it was smart enough lol
Thanks both of you for your very informative posts…forewarned is forarmed, i think i may have been a little lucky by the sound of it. I will stick with the little safer Ncleaner.
hmm, thinking about it the possible cause why it messed up some startup program entries for me is because I use StartRightwhich moves all my startup entries into itself to takecare of but still leaves them listed in windows registry so nothing gets messed up. and Regcure in my case thought that such entries for startup programs i rarely use are dead entries or old entries since windows no longer starts up those programs for me but StartRight does.
well i guess REgcure is relatively safe for alot of ppl but anyone who uses StartRight or something else are better checking what keys RegCure lists for deletion before they click clean and the keys are removed, as for why it messed up the uninstalls for me as well, i can’t say, it just means for now if i want to update such things as my display driver/software then i have to do it in safemode where atleast its able to do it
its defintely wiser to be safer, its a lesson i generally obey but at times i get carried away and forget that such programs may cause probs and remove something which cannot be easily fixed, i generally hate having to do a Fresh install of WinXP so i try to ere on the safe side, unfortunately al it takes is one regcleaner program to remove things it shouldn’t and then one has to live with it if it if everything else works or consider resintalling XP :-\ I ain’t gonna reinstall XP, i have figured how to get my systemtray icon back but the solution isn’t a real good one, if i uninstall the driver/software and resinstall it, the systemtray icon appears, but now if i use CCleaner it removes its NVtaskbar reg key, which it would never do before, so for me Regcure must have removed more than one key probably as Info-Sec suggested and old entry hook key that my nvtaskbar systemtray icon tool relied on but now is gone
Yeah its strange and annoying :-\ and I regret using so many system optimizers and registry cleaners now. I’ve found its far better not tweaking Windows to begin with, although manually tweaking it hasn’t led to any probs, just unofrutnately leaving it in the hands of an optimizer program is where one runs the risk of the unkwown ever happening :-\ lol. but I guess I will just put it down to something I’ve learnt and now i know which optimizer and reglceaning programs to use and which to never risk using again.
this is the main thing it messed up it has to be something to do in the registry “RUNDLL32.EXE C:\WINDOWS\System32\NvMcTray.dll,NvTaskbarInit”
when i went to look at the registry key i found it was empty it had no value set and the key said just default with a blank value string. so i clicked modify binary and i could tell it was for NvMCTray, so i modiied the key to point to this path → RUNDLL32.EXE C:\WINDOWS\System32\NvMcTray.dll,NvTaskbarInit
nope still wouldn’t fix the Nvidia tray icon and make it come back, so i excluded the key from startright and created a new binary value in the registry startup Run once key for the nvidia systemtray icon.
nothing has worked and i’m left frustrated some lol, even disabling and renabling it in msconfig is not working for it.
For alot of ppl they would like to get rid of nview’s little green system tray icon, where as i find it useful for my displays.
its funny when my printer controlpanel systemtray icon got messed with it was simple to fix that by uninstalling and reinstalling the driver/software, just this other one nothing i’ve tried works (:AGY)
but its made me start thinking about upgrading my CPU been thinking about it for ages, maybe now is as good a time as any, currently I’ve got a single core sempron and i do alot of multi-tasking like watching movies while me or anyone else surfs the net or I do alot of dvd burning. so maybe its time i make the jump and get myself a dual core cpu ;D then I think I’ll reinstall WinXP fresh and this time I think I’ll not tweak Winxp so much and will only use anything i’ve used for quite a while and hasn’t caused any probs. like CCleaner and also i think I’ll try not to bloat up my sytem with too much security programs when i don’t seem to need it. CFP 3 that would be something i would most likely reinstall again since it gives me added peace of mind
just thought I’d update this a bit ;D I decided to uninstall and reinstall my graphics display driver/sfotware again and reinstall it, normal windows mode it gives a (0)null error with some numbers, it looks like part of the information in the registry for the uinstall is missing.
i’ve not used CCleaner yet, I decided to download the regcleaner i was using for a long time before I ever changed to CCleaner and tried RegCure. so am downloading EasyCleaner http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/index.htm
it may not be able to delete every single dead entry but its defintely one of the best and has been around along long time it only deletes safe to delete registry entries and it lists exactly what each entry it finds can be deleted are for. so am doing a backup image of my C:\drive then will install it and use it to clean my registry, hopefully this time the nvidia taskbar remains, it would seem that RegCure did mess up my registry to do with in particular the nview taskbar and whatever keys for the uninstall. the uninstall mess up i can live with, but the nview taskbar naa,
so i guess let this be a lesson to those who try the more powerful optimizer regcleaner tools
its better to stick ones that are alot safer
done running EasyCleaner 2.0 and rebooted and my nvidia nview taskbar icon is still there :BNC
you asked what would i recommend as an alternate Bader40
well i would say Easycleaner 2.0 it can be used for Winxp and Vista I had been using EasyCleaner for years, but when CFP 3 came out and the problem with it uninstalling and cleaning up itself, i read alot of ppl saying they use CCleaner and recommending it, so it got me curious and i swapped the recgleaner i had been using for years and went for CCleaner then i wanted something to clean up my registry even more thorughly, so i added RegCure.
well I learnt my lesson now. you can’t go wrong with Easycleaner its been around for years and used to be known as one of the top safe and best Regcleaners there is and every entry it finds it lists exactly what they are and the path to the file the keys belong to.
I’m gonna stick with Easycleaner from now on and keep it as my only reglceaner its bye bye to CCleaner as well for me ;D
all i can say - most of these “optimizations” do literally nothing to system performance, some are even dangerous. good example is “registry optimizing”. You see, registry - it’s just a couple of files. do you really think that having 2 extra kb’s of registry size will seriously affect system performance? another excelent example - RAM optimizers. From the first sight it seems beneficial to free up some RAM. But what it does? Unloads “unused” data (not been used for, say, 5 minutes) to swap file and freeing up precious RAM. But in the end - when you need that data again - it is being read from disk, not from RAM, which is MUCH slower.
lol true they do have their risks and tend to make little difference.
I tend to install alot of software though and I hate having dead entries be it left over folders or left over no longer vaild registry entries that programs put there but never completely clean up and remove when you uninstall them (:AGY)
but I’m happy with Easycleaner i did almost a dozen reboots and uninstalled a few programs such as CCleaner that i no longer value and ran Easycleaner a few more times. its not messed up the registry and has only deleted left overs assosication keys for CCleaner and a theme manager i uninstalled.
as for Ram optimizing programs. its funny you mention that, cause I installed RamBooster the other day lol. I have 1GB of ram i find its enough for Winxp. On my old PC i had with winxp on it I had 512mb on that machine. so 1GB I think is fine for me. but i have my swap file at twice the size of the amount of memory installed because I do alot of dvd burning, but more than that I use photo editing programs that uses up memory and the page files quickly, so i thought having a rambooster to recover 10% of my mem and no more than that is a good idea.
I think in general its best ppl sticking to software they’ve tried and used and had no problems with than ever going with the crowd and trying something different, which was my mistake i thought something else might do an even better job unfortunately it only ended up messing my system up.
if you read the firewall section for CFP 3 though you’ll see that its been recommended time after time to run a registry cleaner like CCleaner to remove every trace of CFP 3.0 before installing it
its software such as that and many others that makes it sometimes necessary to run a cleanup optimize program just to make sure that something installs and works right.
oh for anyone who reads this and is curious or interested in trying EasyCleaner 2.0. onething about it is its no longer being developed, there will never be a newer version or any updates, i guess thats the reason I got curious about trying another regleaner cause I wanted to see how good it would be.
really ??? :o you mean even CCleaner? i have about 4 registry cleaning apps on my comp ( i don’t bother to uninstall them) , each one can detect different “invalid entry”. i don’t use them all at once, but i use CCleaner a lot! :o
CCleaner isn’t solely a registry cleaner. It cleans cache and a whole bunch of other stuff that eats up disk space but doesn’t harm your system.
yes, it’s true that sometimes you just HAVE to clean the system from leftovers, but i prefer doing it manually. Just type “cfp.exe” (and then “cmdagent.exe” and maybe “COMODO”, you install path (e. g. "C:\Program Files\COMODO")) in search box and delete every entry you find - maybe a little longer than using tweakers, but this time you know what exactly you are deleting.
EDIT: of course i meant to type “cfp.exe” and other stuff in regedit, not in plain windows search box :-))
manually remove registry entry is not an option for me, regedit is a sacred place on my comp ;D
so, for a dummy, is it OK not to use registry cleaning app at all? let see, i have :
CCleaner 2.01.507 (use it daily)
Glary utilities (it has option to edit/disable/enable which app to run at start up)
regvac (i think this one removed lots of “comodo firewall” entry, never use it since that)
regseeker
jouni vuorio registry cleaner
what about 'em? i don’t use them all, but since they don’t use too much resources, i’m still keeping them.
For this matter do not use ANY registry cleaner in my opinion, just as I said the registry is quite sensitive and it should be left alone. O.o
