Why do registry errors keep coming back?

I removed the product name from the question because I did not, in fact, recommend it. My assumption is that the reader misinterpreted an ad (which is provided by Google) as a recommendation on my part. No matter what site you’re on it’s important to understand that advertisements rarely represent endorsements, and they certainly don’t here.

The answer to your real question – “why?” – does, indeed, get complicated.

But my recommendation turns out to be very, very simple.

Long time readers may recall my somewhat controversial position that the best registry clean is no registry cleaner. By that I mean that I do not recommend regularly running registry cleaners at all. I may use them when attempting to resolve certain types of problems, but in my experience, they’re simply too powerful for frequent or casual use, and often cause more problems than they resolve.

Now, about the registry…

The registry is nothing more than a managed database; a very simple loosely structured database into which programs including Windows can store and retrieve information on a system-wide or per-user basis.

One problem is this concept of “loosely structured”. In reality, there are very few rules as to what goes into the registry. There are some rules around where things belong in the registry, but even those aren’t necessarily applied consistently, and certainly not enforced.

Given that there’s so little definition around what programs use the registry for, that leads us directly to the hardest question of all:

What does it mean for a registry to be dirty? What’s an “error”?

And that, in turn, leads to the most egregious problem with registry cleaners: they make assumptions about what is and is not an error, and what is and is not dirty or clean.

The good news is that a lot of those assumptions are often correct.

The bad news is that a lot of those assumptions are often at the very least questionable, and frequently wrong.

For example, if the registry has a reference to a file that no longer exists, that might be considered “dirt”, but we can’t really call it an “error” because it might well be legitimate.

Let’s say you edit a document in Word, and word puts that document in its list of most recently edited files, which is kept in the registry. Now you exit Word, and later delete the file you edited. Word never had a chance to remove the file from the list – so it remains in the registry – but the file’s been removed. That’s certainly not an error, and even if we thought that it was, I’d be hard pressed on where to place the blame.

Another common scenario is uninstalling software.

It’s not at all uncommon for software that has been uninstalled to leave behind information in the registry, on purpose. Some applications choose to leave behind your settings and customizations so that information is not lost should you re-install the application. Others may leave behind the fact that they’ve been activated, or that they’re only a trial version set to expire on a certain date.

You can certainly argue whether that’s right or wrong or how it should be handled, but once again it’s not technically an error since it’s purposeful. Even then, it simply is what it is.

And whatever it is, registry cleaners don’t agree on how to deal with it. One may call it an error, another may warn, and a third may ignore it all together.

One will call it garbage, and another will not.

And they both may be right, depending on how you look at it.

Now, I’ve no doubt that there are many applications out there that don’t use the registry properly – having written software that uses it myself I can say that it’s very easy to get it wrong, and easy to consider it unimportant to clean up when deadlines loom.

But I’ll also say that much of what applications do correctly, or at least intentionally, is often labeled as an “error” when in fact it is not.

And yes, for the record, I do believe that the entire concept of the registry, while initially a laudable approach to solving several different problems, has gone far, far astray. Like most geeks, I now much prefer the Linux-style approach of using plain text files in specific ways for keeping the same kinds of information currently kept in the registry.