Can anyone recommend a registry clean-up tool?

[robjduk]

Morning,

I have a niggling annoyance where a staff laptop keeps coming up on my vulnerability scanner as having old versions of Python installed, however, I know for sure it is no longer on the laptop. It's not a problem as such but I'm trying to shrink this report and its annoying me.

Back in the old days, I used to have registry cleaning tools to sort things like this out but now they are all scams (arguably were back then too) so wonder if anyone can recommend a (preferably free) solution I can run on this laptop to find whatever reference to this now removed software which is triggering these reports.

 

Thanks

[6Foot2]

How about flatten and rebuild instead?

[robjduk]

How about flatten and rebuild instead?

 

Although I agree with this, its the laptop of our head of computing who has a TON of software installed and set up just right. If it were something serious I wouldn't have a problem but since its just to remove an annoyance, I'm looking for a softer approach.

[psydii]

I have a few "special little flowers" of devices on our network. I just tidy them up by hand. The rest if they don't come into compliance automatically or with a quick and dirty script, we wipe and reload.

 

Registry clearing tools are generally not a good idea and may often break a machine permanently in subtle ways that cannot be recovered.

[Dos_Box]

It may also be worth your running SFC /SCANNOW from the command line as well as perhaps doing a repair install (without removing apps).

Let's face it though, there comes a stage when the only alternative is to flatten the thing and begin again. It does sound like the teacher has been running this for some time and just like human DNA, the laptop will develop faults that can't easily be fixed over time.

[MatthewL]

I doubt you will find any free tools for commercial use just home. I use CCleaner for home, might be worth looking at their professional range.

[mavhc]

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/uninstall_view.html

[Fazza]

Registry clearing tools are generally not a good idea and may often break a machine permanently in subtle ways that cannot be recovered.

 

This is my experience when using such programs, they often can cause more problems that you were trying to solve sadly.

[Koldov]

Had a terrible experience with CCleaner, absolutely killed an old XP install back in the day...

 

It 'may' be worth running something like that if it has a function where it just finds issues and displays them before doing anything... but YMMV, UAYOR!

 

Having said that, concerning the OP about Python, I had it installed on the ICT suite computers years ago, but the teachers didn't like trying to learn it and troubleshoot it when the kid's coding went wrong (so it never really got used).

 

I uninstalled it from each machine manually (small school so only 30 computers) and forgot all about it. Then for some reason whilst working on a machine much later I saw Python still sitting there (can't remember now where, might have been in add/remove programs, or the start menu or something) and uninstalling and rebooting didn't work.

 

Anyway it was a long time ago and I've forgotten how I 'fixed' it in the end, but I do have a GPO that I remember I had to deploy to delete a reg entry and it states:

 

 

Hive HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Key path Installer\Products\8A2613682CCEAE53DB7F0EA94C651E46

 

You can see if that one is at that location at least...?

 

I can't remember how I found that this particular entry was the problem or how it related to the Python install (I have in the past been known to 'Find' everything related and just delete it from the registry for stubborn programs - not that I'm recommending it, because that's no better than CCleaner ).

[chaplic]

Run Procmon

run the vulnerability scanner on a machine it reports on it

Pick thorugh what the vuln scanner is looking at, you can probably search for 'python' and so on. Nuke said keys/ files

Re-run scan. if all good, automated to push out as required..