ActiveX and/or Registry Cleaner?

Hello.

This is a topic much discussed but I ask the question again after spending lots of time trying many programs out.

The only thing I ended up with is that none of them can be trusted to do a perfect (safe) job and you better know what you're doing before using them.

So I lower my expectations.

Do you know of ANY cleaner (registry/ActiveX) that can flag items that are actually missing?
The cleaner should at least verify that the items are NOT somewhere in the system/user path. It will take longer to do that but so be it.

In my experience, they all claim a file is missing if the file is defined in the registry without a path.
Some of them claim the file is not found in the path, but that's also wrong since they never actually search. (I copied missing files all over, including \system32, and even traced the file accesses of the cleaner which showed no accesses though the path for any file).

Any cleaner that does the above and I might have missed?

Thanks.

 

So you want a cleaner to FIND missing registry & ActiveX items?

I thought registry cleaners just found items to delete.

I'll keep an eye on this. I might just learn something.

 

Just in case you're serious and what I said wasn't clear

Registry cleaners scan the registry (surprise, surprise) and flag some entries in it that refer to files that presumably do not exist in the hard disk and therefore can be safely deleted.

I'd rather avoid letting them delete entries if the file actually exists, so I expect them to search the system path to verify the file is not there before putting it up for deletion.

So, what registry cleaner actually searches the path before declaring files as missing?

 

Basically -- they all do. Some good ones are...

Ace Utilities

RegSeeker

 

Not really.

I haven't looked at Ace but I just tried RegSeeker (I replaced mine with the latest version).

It's either too slow or one of my protection utilities slows it down.

Whatever the case, it also flagged many entries with "File or Path does not exist".
The files both exist and they are in the path.

Considering it found more than 6000 ActiveX entries in HKCR that I could not possibly verify, it makes this program unusable too.

Regards.