Why are registry cleaners an important component of PC Maintenance?
From Wikipedia: Registry cleaners, or registry cleanup software, may improve the performance of computers by ridding the registry of redundant information. Due to the sheer size and complexity of the registry database, manually cleaning up debris and invalid entries would be impractical, so registry cleaners are essentially tools that automate the process of looking for invalid entries, missing file references or broken links within the registry and resolving them. The correction of an invalid registry key can provide some benefits. For example, on older versions of Windows, a registry entry indicating a program should be run at startup from a network path that no longer exists can delay startup by as long as the network protocol takes to timeout. […] Noted Windows architecture expert Mark Russinovich has concluded that registry cleaners will continue to have a role until most applications have moved to the .NET Framework platform that does not rely on the registry for application se
