Legitimacy of Registry Cleaners?

[SlowPC Help]

Thanks for considering my question. I'm new here and am hoping to tap into the wisdom of crowds about registry repair software.

I've been doing some research on registry repair software and have found quite a bit of conflicting information. I've found tons (probably 25 or more) "review" websites that claim to review different registry repair options. I found that most of them recommend a small group of registry repair programs, that other (seemingly more legitmate) sources have claimed to be very poor programs. The "top rated" programs also happen to be the ones with the highest paid commissions with their affiliate programs (smells fishy). I'm thoroughly convinced that these "review" sites (at least a lot of them) are clearly biased (and provide virtually no helpful information). I've heard from some that in most cases these registry repair packages cause more problems that they fix.

As such, I'm looking for some experts that have actually had some experience with registry cleaners or have done it on their own. Which, if any, of the registry cleaners on the market actually do a good job (in terms of effective cleaning as well as safety. It would need to be easy to use, however)?Or do you believe that most are junk and are out to get your money?

What I don't want is a bunch of plugs by the companies, so please, only post if you have a good number of previous posts on the forum.

All your recommendations and commentary are well appreciated. Thank you in advance!

[cluberti]

Honestly, I've always found registry "cleaners" to be utter crap, and at the least dangerous. Since the registry is a database of program data, settings, etc for both Windows and the applications installed with no "listing" or history of what's been added or removed, nor by who, there's no real way for a cleaner to 100% know what it should leave, and what is 'safe' to delete. While I am sure registry corruption doesn't happen frequently with these, it's always a possibility. Also, in reality, even if you were to trim a few KB from the registry, what improvement or benefit would you actually get? With NT-based systems (NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Win7) you have a registry that is already fairly efficient, and also memory-mapped for faster access, and as such "bloat" (whatever that is) of the registry really shouldn't cause you any performance detriment, and conversely, you aren't going to really get anything valuable out of "cleaning" it either - the stuff you might really want to clean (locked / undeletable registry keys, malware, etc) can't be touched by these anyway, and require something deeper (like sysinternals tools, or an offline ERD disk).

Registry "cleaning" is a holdover from the 9x days, when you really could get some benefit from trimming your registry down. Nowadays, however, I can't really see any benefit to it (especially considering you *could* permanently damage it if you aren't careful).