Thanks, You are right. Actually I had already tried this and had seen something very odd, but could't make the connection. After further searching I came to the following conclusion: Because of the univeral printer driver (UPD) of hewlett packard, the registry becomes cluttered from here: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Hewlett-Packard]. As I understand this problem is resolved with a version 4.7. But still this doesn't delete the thousands and thousands of registry keys that are left behind after a user connection has ended. When Exporting the registry from the key mentioned it makes a 16MB textfile, and thats only the clutter from the UPD. As a result, whenever installing or removing software, msiexec is reading all these registry keys (don't know why), which can take more than 30 minutes. I traced this from withing "Process Monitor" from Sysinternals. Now my question: Is it save to remove ALL, keys like this one: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Hewlett-Packard\153f1296-c65c-47cb-3f99-19c35e24d3ce, starting at [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Hewlett-Packard]?. Maybe someone has provided a tool to do just this?