[jdm]

"And how would us non-professionals know which registry keys are suspicious?"

Just take a wild guess as to which registry keys need to be removed. I'm a non-professional as well and I'm constantly editing my registry. If you don't see me on FR for a week or two at a time, it's most likely because I've edited my registry.

[dagnabbit]

Low-Mortage-rates-and-member-enlargement bump for later reading.

[B4Ranch]

Before playing in the Registry, do a Restore. That way if you screw up, just go back to Restore and start over.

One of the better programs I've found for cleaning the Registry is Win UltraCleaner(about$25). It will remove all empty links that do not have a value to the system. By that I mean when you have removed a program and it left some empty files, UltraCleaner removes them.