I’ve seen alot of people say its really dangerous to use a program to clean your registry but I have a desktop thats running pretty slow and no matter what I try it doesn’t seem to go as fast as I think it could. Cleaning the registry is something I haven’t tried yet but I don’t want to risk screwing up windows. Is it safe to use a program to clean the regiustry or is it best to leave it to people who really know what they are doing to do it manually?

my windows explorer has been messed up 4 two days now, and i think it's a virus, but i have used so much anti virus scanner, it still dosnt work……. I have spyware doc and it says a malicous file is trying to get in explorer.exe or something…… when trying to get to control panel through task manager…. and im just wondering about a software to repair this..

What is the best (FREE) software that every computer technician should have?

Please list software such as free antivirus, diagnostic, spyware removal, etc. What are the best tools?
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all right – i use spybot s&d to clean my computer, but i also use registry patrol to keep my registry intact, mainly because it saves backups if something goes wrong. i updated and scanned today and spybot identified registry patrol as malware – it said it disguised itself as a registry cleaner and labeled small problems as high risk. it's never been identified before, and other people using it don't seem to have this problem. is it malware? i removed it just in case, but if it's not, i can restore it.

I have Windows XP, just wondering about free virus protection. Also, is it as good as the ones you have to pay for?