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After a fresh Windows reinstall I discovered that my HKEY_CURRENT_USER key takes only 4MB vs 33MB it took in the old Windows (before reinstall).

I have found out that a Chinese mouse driver (VicTsing T1 Gaming mouse) I used for a few days stored a huge PDF file in registry as binary data to:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\T1gmmouse]
"ProfileSettingGroup.pfd"=hex:00 etc etc etc

Probably there are other similar horrors there to fill up the rest of the space, up to 30MB.

So, how do I find out the size of each registry key, or better, the top 30 registry keys by size?

For example, if you press Shift+Alt+Enter in Total Commander, it will show the size of each folder. Maybe there is something similar but for registry?

Or maybe there is a Windows script that could export each individual registry key to a reg file, to the reg files will be sorted later by size?

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  • Best I can come up with is using TreeSize free, and selecting the folder %SystemRoot%\System32\Config as your scan path. Nov 13, 2017 at 11:33
  • @spikey_richie- access is denied for that folder. and there are other issues.
    – IceCold
    Nov 13, 2017 at 20:44

1 Answer 1

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Nirsoft, that little house of wonders, apparently made a utility to do just this, and it is actively developed: http://www.nirsoft.net/articles/find_registry_large_values.html

Note, I have no relationship with Nirsoft.

Using this utility you can query registry keys and, among other things, get the size of individual key values.

Run the utility, and then: (the following steps are from the link above)

  1. In the 'Registry Scan Options' window, uncheck the 'Add entry for each found key' option, and choose 'Registry item contains any value' in the matching combo-box.
  2. Check the 'Display only data with the following lenth range' option, and type the data length range that you want to find. In our example, we chose to view all Registry values with length of 5000 bytes and up to length of 100000 bytes.
  3. Click the 'OK' button to start the Registry scanning. After the scanning process is finished, you should get the list of all large Registry values according to the data length range that you have selected.
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    That tool is very limited to only analyze and show up to 10.000 entries. Totally useless on real world scenarios because that reason. Aug 28, 2018 at 7:00
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    The tool appears to have been updated to allow you to scan more than 10,000 entries. I don't know what the max is, but only the default is 10,000 now.
    – Logarr
    May 1, 2023 at 14:36

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