RegMaid Utility-Cleaning Your Registry

RegMaid Utility—Cleaning Your Registry

RegMaid is a utility developed by Microsoft to help track down and clean up problematic OLE entries in the Registry database. RegMaid is quite easy to use and, at the same time, provides the user with as much information about problematic registry entries as possible (Fig. 14.3). This information can then be used to decide which entries you want to delete and which you want to repair.

Figure 14.3: The RegMaid utility main window

Information on the OLE components is stored in the registry under the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry key, where you typically find subsections such as CLSID, TypeLib, Interface, and Progld.

The RegMaid utility considers CLSID entries to be problematic if they contain a handler or server entry for a file that cannot be found. There are several ways in which this situation may arise. A few of the most common include: deleting or moving a file or a broken network path.

ProgId entries will be identified as broken when the associated CLSID cannot be found in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID. As a result, deleting CLSID entries will cause related ProgId entries to be listed.

TypeLib entries are identified broken when the associated file cannot be found.

Interface entries are considered broken when the TypeLib entry cannot be matched to one in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib. Consequently, deleting TypeLib entries will allow RegMaid to identify the associated problem.

RegMaid provides information about the entries believed to be problematic in the form of a report, where the user can make multiple row selections. Once selections have been made, the user can then delete them from the registry. Although RegMaid does not currently have Archive or Restore capabilities, it does provide a printed report mechanism for each of the four views.

Officially, Windows 9x and Windows NT support this utility, but testing on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 revealed that it works here as well and is rather useful.

This freeware utility is essential for advanced users, and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center (http://www.microsoft.com).