I have used CCleaner for many. many years and have often used the register cleaner. I have never had any negative issues as a result of this. To be safe, I do however make a point of backing up the registry.
After reading a lot of articles focused on registry cleaning, the consensus is to never use a registry cleaner. It can be noted that CCleaner was often mentioned as the least invasive and therefore the least likely to cause harm.
I now feel that it's best to skip the registry cleaning part of the CCleaner program. Do you agree?
On my old XP system I use it all the time, because I know the stuff it's presenting me with, and it's only caused a problem once many years ago but that was because of a file association issue with IrfanView.
You get so little performance or space gain from doing one that I challenge anyone to be able to quantify such an action.
Back in the 98 or XP days, one such registry optimiser (Norton Utilities maybe?) used to give me like 4% space improvement on the registry files (SAM and the rest) but when you convert that to system wide figures, that's one tenth of bugger all.
Now factor in quad code processors, SSD's, and any of the modern gen technologies, there simple is no benefit in cleaning the registry. But like all legacy processes, it's a hard habit to break.
And while any benefits may be small to nil, the risks are substantially inversely proportional.
I do however recommend using reg cleaning as a last straw when cleaning a system of malware. I had a PC within the last 3 years where every scan known to man didn't improve the situation until I ran CC's reg cleaner and BOOM, problem fixed.
I do however recommend using reg cleaning as a last straw when cleaning a system of malware.
Some anti-tools ("antivirus, anti-malware", etc.,) will sometimes leave some malware traces behind in the registry, doesn't mean the system is still infected but another scanner may find the key and deem the system as infected.