Uninstallers provided by software vendors are notoriously less than thorough. Typically traces of the software remain on your computer even after the uninstaller has finished successfully. Proof can be found by taking a look through your Program Files folder and noticing directories named after software vendors you’ve long since uninstalled. To be fair, we aren’t talking gigabytes of space being gobbled up by the leftover bits, but it can be annoying to those of us that like to keep our system clean and organized. Worse though are uninstallers that leave dangling references inside the Windows Registry. As the registry is vital to the operations of Windows, it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep it running in tip top shape. While it’s easy to go through your computer and deleted left over files, it’s a much different process and concept when it comes to the registry.

RegDllView is a small and free utility from the guys at NirSoft – whom I’ve written about previously – that can aid in the clean-up of the registry. The single executable will scan the registry upon launch and return all the registered DLL files as well as any accompanying information associated with the DLL – vendor, date of registration, version, product name, etc. DLLs still registered in the system but not found on the harddrive are highlighted in red. These DDLs can be unregistered by right-clicking on the highlighted line and choosing Unregister. As is good practice when making changes in the registry, RegDllView provides the ability to create backups of any changes you may make should you wish to revert any deletion.

Will going through every missing DLL entry and cleaning up the registry lead to a noticeably faster computer? Not likely, so why bother? Sometimes the peace of mind brought about by a clean and efficient system is all the motivation needed.