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I've been having ongoing issues with my system not starting correctly sometimes.

I've run chkdsk on my C: drive and have run sfc. Both reported no issues. Next I thought I'd get a registry cleaner and only use it to check the integrity of the registry to see if that might be the issue. I'm not doing any "auto" clean.

One of the things it pointed out was there there empty keys for my C: drive and D: drive. For my C: drive it's:

All these keys are empty. Can they be safely deleted?

It's the same for my D: drive. All those keys are empty.

All these keys are empty. Can they be safely deleted?

Does anyone know why they are there or what they may be for? Can I safely I delete them?

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    “Can I safely I delete them?” - No
    – Ramhound
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 12:06
  • What is the full registry path to the C: or D: key shown above? I do not have them and have never seen them before.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Feb 22, 2023 at 19:47

1 Answer 1

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Deleting empty registry keys definitely won't fix invalid startup of the system. If anything, it can make things worse, as some apps may start having errors related to missing registry keys, if any try to read them. To fix that problem, I'd rather focus on reading Windows Event Log, especially errors and warnings that reside there.

As for what registry keys are for, it's not easy to detect that, especially that you shared screenshots of small parts of the tree instead of providing full key paths such as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows. One of them seems to be related to MakeMKV application after a quick Google and we don't know if you have that installed and which features of the application you're using. Unfortunately Windows doesn't track the processes that creeated or wrote to a key, for that you need to use 3rd party applications, such as Process Monitor, on the fly, but since they're empty, that method doesn't help as it's unlikely anything will write to or read from them.

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  • Thanks. I know that won't fix the startup issues. I was just giving a reason why I had used CCleaner. Yes I do have MakeMKV installed. The full key is: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\C:. similarly HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\D:, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\F:, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\K:, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\L:, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\V:, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Y: and HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Z:. I have a lot of disks. Some of the subkeys do list some of my Videos folders and some list other things. I did find a NirSoft app that supposedly will track any updates to the registry made by a program.
    – SDMark
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 22:54
  • No idea what they are then, but I don't think there's any point of deleting them.
    – Destroy666
    Commented Feb 28, 2023 at 1:28
  • Thanks. I'll leave them be.
    – SDMark
    Commented Mar 2, 2023 at 23:32

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