A few problems

The old (4? years and counting) desktop computer is showing its age. It locks up way too often, and it takes forever to boot up. In addition, our SpySweeper isn't working right (it hasn't found so much as a tracking cookie in 2 weeks), and I still haven't been able to establish a connection between the desktop and our new laptop. As I hinted a week ago, it may be time to start all over by sweeping everything off the hard drive and reinstalling XP. Before going to that extreme, however, I thought I'd try a more conservative approach.

I downloaded and ran Little Registry Cleaner in hopes that it would identify some garbage in the registry that I could safely remove and thereby restore the computer to good-as-new condition. Sigh. It found 670 "problems," and I don't know what to do about any of them. More accurately, I don't know how risky it is for me to tell LRC to fix them. Geeks in the audience who want to offer an opinion should feel free. Here's a summary of what LRC found:

• 314 "Invalid file or folder," mostly in the History list, but also a couple dozen each in Shared DLLs and in Drivers.
• 256 (there's a computer number for you) "Unable to find InprocServer32," all in ActiveX/COM objects.
• 45 "unused file extensions," also all in Active X/COM objects.
• 30 "the registry key doesn't contain any data," in Software Settings.

Update: The LifeHacker post that put me on to LRC is here, along with comments from readers/users. A minority of the users are skeptical about the benefits of any registry cleaner, especially in view of the risks. Their arguments sound very sensible to me.