Registry cleaners

The registry on a Windows Operating System is, generally speaking managed very well, by the system, without any user interference.

Only in cases of registry corruption, caused for example by a sudden power loss when Windows is writing to the registry, or by malicious downloads is manual action necessary.

There are recognised procedures for dealing with registry corruption using "regedit" at the cmd. prompt or indeed rebuilding the registry in cases where Windows will not load, by using the Recovery Console.

Within the "Home User Group" of computer owners it is probably fair to say that only a small percentage understand the registry or indeed know what it actually does.
It is therefore surprising that a large number of these people choose to install Registry Cleaning/Optimize programs and the hundreds of other such downloads that frequently appear as advertisements.

The vast majority of these programs are near to useless and many are dangerous to the health of the computer. Registry Boosters and "Make your computer boot faster" programs which advertise as "delete all unwanted items in your registry and defrag the registry" are, generally speaking amongst this category of unwanted software. Even if the
program could distinguish between entries which can be safely removed and those on which other entries are dependant, the actual improvement in loading time of Windows could not be measured without a split second timer.

If Windows is taking time to load then a disabling and changing to manual of any number of services using the cmd "services.msc" and a look at the StartUp items in "msconfig" is likely to be far more productive than any registry booster. (There are many other reasons why Windows could be slow loading)

In summary - DO NOT INSTALL this type of program.
If you wish to read the opinion of an expert - see this.
http://miekiemoes.blogspot.com/2008/02/registry-cleaners-and-system-tweaking_13.html

I like CCleaner. It simply saves me the time of manually shifting through the regedit hierarchies.

The decision is yours.
However I still maintain that ANY automated registry cleaner is to be avoided.
For what purpose is it run.
If it is to clean the registry of entries no longer required, this is unnecessary.
If it is in an attempt to solve problems, there are far ebtter ways of going about this.

This is a quote from a certified Malware Removal advisor.
If I were you, I'd use ATF Cleaner. It doesn't target registry entries at all, and is quick and safe. I have yet to hear of any circumstances in which it harmed a user's computer. While CCleaner is not a bad program, any program that allows the user to scan the registry and delete entries has the potential to cause damage to the PC.