Why doesn't CCleaner cleanup these Registry entries?

[Compumind]

Hi all:

 

Using CCleaner 3.20.1750 and prior versions, I have noticed that under the main Registry Key:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE

 

There are many entires in my system for software that was removed a long time ago.

Try as I might, I don't see any options for removing the dead stuff through CCleaner and had to do it all by hand. Is this a bug?

 

TIA

[pwillener]

They may be pointing to stuff that still exists on your system.

 

Anyway, you shouldn't worry too much about the Windows registry; it doesn't really matter if it is a few bytes larger or smaller.

[Andavari]

If it's a completely empty key then CCleaner's registry cleaner may or will find it as invalid, however if there's any data/settings still stored in the key then CCleaner would leave it alone regardless of rather the software that created the key is still installed or uninstalled. That can actually cause many registry cleaners to leave a key alone!

[Compumind]

Thanks for the replies.

 

Most of these keys are empty, but not all. Guess I would have expected that CCleaner should have picked the empty ones up.

Even though these keys might be small, the idea is to clean the registry, right?

 

IMO, CCleaner just needs a bit of tweaking, no biggie.

[Andavari]

The idea is to clean the registry but safely, and CCleaner is deemed by many to be "safer" to use than many other registry cleaning tools.

 

There's more than enough aggressive registry cleaners which will dig deep into your system, but you'd have to use them with extreme caution and verify pretty much everything they want to remove.