Windows Registry/System Cleaners

Question

I know this doesn't sound like a programming question, but every Windows XP developer box I use ends up with a high degree of cruft after several months. The first few months it runs like the wind, everything is smooth, applications compile instantly. After a few months of registering and unregistering dll's, installing and uninstalling utilities, it comes to a crawl. A fresh re-install of windows and the same box is back up to speed for the next few months. What do you people use as good windows cleaners (especially registry cleaning up bad com DLL registrations, etc) for programmers? What strategies do you use to keep your windows box humming along and responsive for programming?

I currently use CCleaner, but find it does almost nothing.

EDIT

I've done the Ghost thing before, and it usually takes almost as long as a clean re-install. Generally after 6 months there are so many service packs, hotfixes, etc to install. What I wanted to do was ghost across my department unfortunately we are not standardized on boxes.

I've thought seriously about going the VMWare route, but we deal with grpahics and the VMWware graphics cards just don't cut it. Also we are moving into WPF and that is just not going to happen under any VM's I have seen so far.

Answer 1

I stopped worrying about registry cruft a long time ago. It seems to me that reg cleaners cause more problems than they solve.

Answer 2

The best get-that-performance-back options:

• Option 1: Reinstalling to a disk image replete with applications and configurations (your data is backed up elsewhere too) that helps you get stuff done.

• Option 2: Option 1 but encapsulated in a Virtual Machine image file (via VMware for example).

Answer 3

Advanced Windows care compliments CCleaner really well and has some great features of its own.

It cleans up your registry and gets some stuff CCleaner misses as well as some nice system tuning, temp file cleanup, and general spyware immunization / removal. It also has some startup recommendations. Best of all, its FREE and is actively devloped.

http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html

Answer 4

I have used Fix-It before and it does a pretty good job!

Answer 5

VMWare runs WPF pretty well in my experience (newer versions enable DirectX acceleration in the VM, plus there are registry settings to make the rendering CPU-bound instead of GPU bound if it's still an issue). But really, I'd recommend using Windows 7 instead if you can, because the reinstall time is so much shorter. I can have my Win7 box reimaged and dev-ready in a couple of hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than XP ever was.