The Junk Drawer

What a joy it is day in day out to deal with Registry corruption or, at least, Registry internal inconsistency.   A rather popular Registry Cleaner utility (not recommended by any means by Microsoft) crashes on my machine because the Registry is messed up.  Not by me, but by certain very, very expensive commercial software vended not by Microsoft.   I'm now running the Recovery Partition to reinitialize the Registry so I can proceed.  One day computers will have either a Registry that will not become internally inconsistent or some better designed catch basin for the memory hole.

The "Last Known Good Configuration" startup option uses a recently saved copy of the registry, have you tried that?

I've never personally had a problem with my registry going kaput in the past 12 or so years; it wasn't Uniblue, was it?

The last know good is written on a the first sucessfull login after boot (or it was back in the NT days)

These days system restore is your friend in such cases.

Only ever had a hadfull of machines that have gone down to bad registry and they could mostly be traced to bad hardware or tools that 'claimed' to clean up my registry.

Every instance of registry "corruption" I've encountered (with the exception of disk/filesystem errors) seems to have occurred after the end-user ran registry "boosters", "cleaners", "fixers", and things like that.

The less one knows about the registry the better. And, when in doubt, don't mess with it.

yup, "registry cleaner" = malware.

As does "driver updater", "adware remover" and most things that call themselves "virus checkers" and "firewall". All junk that'll mess up your PC. Stick with what you can download from Microsoft of the vendor of your hardware.

I've yet to see a single "Registry Cleaner" that doesn't end up causing problems down the line. You're far better off never running any of them.