My experience is otherwise. I don't completely trust malware scanners, but restoring executables and the registry removes active malware. You can then clean any infected files, because they're orphaned.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "facts".
Besides, Microsoft disagrees with you.
You can’t clean a compromised system by removing the back doors. You can never guarantee that you found all the back doors the attacker put in. The fact that you can’t find any more may only mean you don’t know where to look, or that the system is so compromised that what you are seeing is not actually what is there.
The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild. That’s right. If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).