1/4 Million Registry Keys?

Yes very plausable to have that many and more, majority of the registry is no just a single key per app, you can for some apps drill down the keys to multiple entries that hold different data for said apps.

I personally wouldn't worry too much about the amount Glenn, just use the pikes of ccleaner to clear any unused old registry keys from uninstalled apps out, but I would not take this to an extreme in trying to reduce it further.

As Mimsy pointed out if you don't know what you are doing in the registry and what the Hives and Keys do and any potential cause and effect that deleting a key will do, it's best to leave alone and just use ccleaners registry cleaner as it's one of the safer ones, others drill down the Hives more aggressively and can potentially leave an app or the OS unresponsive.

 

Hi Glenn

No wouldnt matter too much how many times you run CCleaners registry cleaner, its safe, as for the number, its likely you have just not noticed before how many you have, this will go up and down depending on what apps you install/uninstall.

I decided to run the app on my PC and well count yourself lucky as I have 321K+ reg entries, but this maybe higher as I dont know enough about Threatfire and its registry scanner and how it works on x64 Windows as 64bit windows duplicates many for the keys for 32bit or 64bit apps.

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/8906/66175989.jpg

Both these are the same but one is 32bit entries (top line) and 64bit entries (bottom line)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WOW6432Node
so will in some cases duplicate application names and some keys, this is normal for 64bit Windows... this is more some background reading as it may not be applicable to your version of Windows if not 64bit, but thought I would add this anyway as I know you like to learn more.

Although dont know what Windows version you using on this PC, guessing Vista and a 32bit Version of Vista (to find out right click Computer and choose Properties)