What are the most common registry problems

Several problems may occur within your registry which are generally related to registry fragmentation and corrupt, unused, missing, orphaned or obsolete entries. Fragmentation may be a serious problem and usually happens because certain processes continually and incrementally modify the same values within the registry.

This fragmentation may, in certain cases, be excessive and eventually registry file sizes could exceed the registry size limits imposed by Windows, possibly also causing any subsequent modifications to the registry to fail. Other registry errors include:

• Incorrect software locations including missing, orphaned, broken or bad application/Windows paths, and links
• Unwanted browser objects
• Corrupt Active X/COM Objects
• Unused, obsolete Start Menu items
• Redundant Startup applications and uninstalled application schedulers
• Orphaned shortcuts, temporary (.tmp) files and Scandisk or Checkdisk fragment (.chk) files
• Missing or corrupt application IDs
• Obsolete shared DLLs and folders
• Unused help file references
• Residual and unused files
• Uninstalled software remnants
• Unused and unwanted drivers
• File extensions and associations
• Invalid fonts and recent files list entries