reinstall

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Unless you have the willingness and ability to rebuild the registry, then I suggest you leave all registry cleaners alone. CCleaner does make a backup, which makes it better than 99% of these types of programs out there… but consider this - what "problems" will a "dirty" registry cause you?  What the registry cleaner is mainly doing is cleaning out orphaned entries.  These entries take up microscopic amounts of memory, but they will not actually cause you any harm.  However, if entries should get removed incorrectly, the registry can get scrambled and then you have a borked system.  To me… any potential benefit is exponentially outweighed by the risk.

I agree Tomk.  I'll stand by registry cleaners are NO, NO, NO.  The registry contains hundreds of thousands of values and there is no way for anybody, including most of Microsoft to understand how all of these settings and values interact.  The problem with cleaning the registry is not when it crashes your system and you restore the registry or a backup and you are on your way.  Its when it breaks something you had no idea was broken until months later and at that point restoring the registry or a backup is useless unless you want to lose 3 months of work and changes.  The latter, in my opinion, is whats more likely to happen.  Just my two cents.  But, what I learned from experience.