I don't recall the registary fix, just that a little net searching narrowed the fix to two potential solutions. I did the easier of the two, which was to clear large files off the desktop, and to quite saving install files on the desktop.
If your looking to clean up your registry a bit try spybot, it does a pretty great job at cleaning spyware out of the registry. Deffinetly my favorite of the spyware programs.
Just a caution from personal experience... if you're going to use a registry cleaner (spybot or any number of others) be sure you have a boot cd and a registry backup to restore to. I've used spybot for many years w/o incident, so I was fairly complacent (read that "reckless") in my use of the program. Several months ago I updated to the latest version of spybot and ran it (w/o taking the time to prepare for disaster recovery). All seemed to work as expected until I rebooted the PC... which suddenly started asking for a password (which didn't exist in my case... ie, I don't password my PC at home). It took me several days to recover my PC... eventually I had to restore to the XP version that I had installed three years ago... then had problems upgrading to SP3, etc. etc. I spent more time reading the MS Knowledgebase and downloading fixes from MS than I care to talk about. I'm not knocking Spybot, just saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Personally I think cleaning/defraging the registry is an urban myth. You won't gain any noticeable speed by doing so, and you most certainly risk corrupting said registry. That said, Crap Cleaner aka ccleaner is a decent tool which is a free download. It has a built in "Registry Integrity" check that is fairly decent. You can also check startup programs, and remove those that are unnecessary, which would definitely speed boot times. Between using ccleaner, and Firefox (with a few choice add-ons) I'm pretty much worry free when it comes to adware (among other nasties).
I agree that cleaning unused and orphaned links in the registry is of limited value in improving performance, but in my experience the defrag action performed by many(most ?) registry cleaners IS a performance enhancer if you do a significant amount of install/try/uninstall activity. I do, so on my system a RC every 6-months or so actually does result in a perceptible performance improvement, notably shortening the startup and shutdown times. Most disk defragmentors cannot defrag the registry so you need to use a registry cleaner that specifically includes a registry defragger. FWIW, I use UniBlue's RegistryBooster2 since my bad experience w/spybot.
Alright, but PC is having a bake sale to fix Windows Vista so things are bound to improve soon :happy102
Looks like 1. At $10 million per muffin, I wouldn't think too many would sell anyway. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVqcF9XowV8
