Everyone has unwanted garbage in the registry, left over by old programs and who knows what. So part of maintenance is cleaning out your registry. Anyone who is anyone will tell you to BE CAREFUL and back up your registry first. Screwing up your registry is probably one of the least fun things you can do to your computer.

I found a really good gratis registry cleaner. It's very well written and was overall easy to use. You can remove all invalid entries, or you can pick and choose.

This program also cleans out any temporary files - not just internet files - but files from program backups as well. It will allow you to remove old programs from the uninstall list as well as your system startup entries (msconfig). Disabling an item from msconfig doesn't remove it, but this does.

Without further adieux....CCleaner. Have a look-see! http://www.ccleaner.com/