I tested one of these registry cleaners that were losted ina another post in this forum and it said I had 35 problem areas!Most of the seem to do with programs no longer installed on my computer. Just how imortant is it to clean them out of the registry? Also, when diabling programs from starting using msconfig, why do you alwsy get taht annoying "selective startup" message. I know you can hide it by checking the box but is safe running selective startup ? Ray

Hi, I'm not sure about the "Selective Startup" thing, someone else will answer that for you I'm sure. If you aren't sure what you are doing, leave well enough alone and don't touch the registry. Bad things happen when wrong keys or keys that aren't supposed to be being used anymore but some other program is, gets deleted. While under most cases old program keys that are long gone can safely be deleted, you have still got to be careful. Before you go about doing it, make sure you have a restore point set in case something goes screwy. It is usually safe to leave these keys alone, so unless they are causing problems, do so. I wouldn't rely too much on a third-party cleaner, it is best that you do the cleaning if you know what you're doing.

the registry is for advanced users only. if you dont know what youre doing steer clear. now i am going to contradict myself and tell you to look for where the programs are starting from and delete them from that location and leave msconfig in regular startup. a lot will be located in registry in hkcu or hklm software,microsoft,windows,current version,run it is safe to remove items from that location in the registry as the worst that will happen as you would need to reinstall a program to put in back in startup.

It says the selective start up message because you have manually disabled some start up programs from starting. The normal way to remove programs from starting up is to go into that problem and change its settings. A normal start up is where all start up programs start, and selective start up is where only selected start up programs are started. As for the registry, windows is sort of sloppy. That, and alot of programmers aren't very thorough (like if you uninstall programs, they won't remove every key that they added to the registry when the program was first installed). Also, when you work with temporary files (internet explorer, ftp, etc), they need to be placed in a temporary folder, and they are added to the registry to keep track of where the files are located. After a while, the registry tends to get cluttered. The registry is just that...a registry (to keep track of stuff). After weeks/months of garbage accumulating in the registry, it might take windows a bit more time to scan through the registry. That's why advanced users like to clean the registry (to speed up windows). Most registry cleaners look through the registry, and for every reference to a file/directory, it checks your hard drive to see if it still exists. If it doesn't, it'll remove that key. However, some registry cleaners like to be more thorough, but they can be over-zealous and delete too much data. It's a good idea to back up your registry before you try anything. Use Window's System Restore feature to create a restore point before you use a registry cleaner. Or, if you want to do it manually, open the registry (start->run->regedit or start->run->regedt32), and export all of the keys to a file. You can then import that file if you want to restore your changes.

After every uninstall, I run Registry Crawler. This program allows you to search using the name of the uninstalled program, and will bring up all registry entries for it. You can then delete them. RegCrawler does make a backup. I've been using it for quite a while with no problems.

Thanks for all the advice. on the issue of selective recovery, i got this advice"It says the selective start up message because you have manually disabled some start up programs from starting. The normal way to remove programs from starting up is to go into that problem and change its settings. A normal start up is where all start up programs start, and selective start up is where only selected start up programs are started." How does one go about making the change where the system starts up? Thanks Ray