Methods or program for reducing registry size?

Going to 7-zip's SourceForge project page and the discussions, one would see that 7-zip has been in alpha/beta stage for years already. Sadly, 7.31 codebase is the last to work in a Win9x environment, according to the discussion topics.

After tinkering for a a while, I've been able to build the 7-zip plug-in for Total Commander from the old 0.7.2.1 sources, right before it got switched to Unicode only. I used the 7-zip 9.20 sources for building it and had to emulate a few newer API to get it to compile under VC6.

The only compatibility problem I suspect is the LZMA2 compression method, which is not present in older 4.x 7-zip versions (reason why I compiled the new plug-in version, as the old 0.5.5 was also based on 7-zip 4.65).

Therefore using a newer - and perfectly 9x-compatible standalone 7-zip setup - would be preferrable. And a software being in alpha/beta stage isn't necessarily bad or buggy - it may just contain incomplete features.

Current stable binary release of 7-Zip which is 9.20 runs perfectly fine under vanilla 98/ME systems. It's been mentioned and confirmed 3 or 4 times already.