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 (
).