A warning to Vista users regarding registry/file cleaners

Felix E

Felix E

Felix E

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Joined
25 Apr 2004
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870
Location
Devon
Only speaking from my personal experience here, but I just wanted to suggest to those trying Vista (especially people like me who do not have expert knowledge) to stear clear of any registry or file cleaners such as CCleaner or Registry Mechanic. Although these programs seem to pick up problems, I have found that Registry cleaners in particular will say that they have found (for example) 180 problems, but will then only fix half of these, with subsequent attempts at deletion yielding nothing more, suggesting that they are not functioning properly under vista.

I also had a very unfortunate experience with CCleaner, after enabling the cleaning of menu order cache, tray notifications cache, window size and location cache, user assist history, IIS log files and custom folders - I ran a scan and cleaned up. After this I went to both of my drives -properties and ran the windows disk cleanup tool. The windows cleanup tool picked up over 50GB (yes GB) of error reporting files on my main system drive, now I assumed this was an error since the drive did not have anywhere near 50gb of data on it at all, let alone in error reporting files. So I ran the delete anyway. I also did the same on my data drive. After doing so, all of the files on my data drive were deleted and upon restart I realised that crucial system files were missing from my main drive, the system would not boot at all and could not be repaired - prompting another re-install.

Now I probably should have been more careful and not deleted the files, but then it never crossed my mind that Windows cleanup disk utility would ever delete essential system files. A subsequent test with CCleaner produced the same result and so I would urge Vista users not to run this program or anything like it until they or another are confirmed safe to use with Vista.

Oh my control panel was also screwed up - became very slow or impossible to open and the same with the networking centre.

Felix
 
If program uninstaller were better there would be no need for reg cleanup tools. I bet they even leave un-needed reg keys behind when they are uninstalled too:).
 
Registry Mechanic will operate on the following versions of Microsoft Windows:

Windows XP (Home and Professional)

Windows 2000 Professional

Windows NT Workstation 4.0

Windows Me

Windows 98

Windows 95 (Compacting is not supported)
Click to expand...

I'd have thought it would have been common sense not to use in-depth tweaking tools less than a week after the release of Vista.
 
Assuming you used the released version, how did it manage to get into a state where it needed these tools running less than a week after it was released?
 
Well I suppose I didn't need to run them at all, I've just got into the habit of cleaning my registry/temporary files etc fairly often and I didn't think that it would cause such problems. Needless to say I'll be a lot more careful in the future.
 
I've never found a need to use those sort of tools - I would balance the need to "keep my system clean" against using tools which are modifying the registry according to a fairly crude method in ways I don't understand or know about. I install the programs I need, I don't install programs I don't need, and I seem to survive.
 
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