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