I don't use windows anymore, but I have to tell you that a free tool I found very useful for dealing with registry issues was Eusing registry cleaner. It used to get rid of a lot of that stuff. I would run it about twice a week. Sometimes a lot of the same stuff would come up because of start-up but it wasn't the malicious stuff. Also for line by line stuff "Hijack this" was pretty good if you feel somewhat confident fiddling around with the registry. None of those darn problems with Linux - thank goodness.