How to find what is bloating my windows registry

Recently, my msi installations begin to took too long. I researched the internet and found this;

http://www.tachytelic.net/2012/03/extremely-long-delay-trying-to-install-msi-installer-packages/

The problem author faced was, something put too many values in registy. I think I am having a similiar problem, because I backed up my registry and it is 256 MB, which I think is much higher value than it is supposed to be?

How can I find out what is bloating my registry?

yasar

Posted 2014-07-13T06:39:03.693

Reputation: 427

Try WhatChanged Portable Utility to monitor modified and newly created files and registry keys and values before and after installing any executables.

– Ĭsααc tիε βöss – 2014-07-13T07:17:32.117

Answers

That is a good article you found and in the event that the article gets removed I will summarise the contents here.

You can download and run a tool by Sysinternals called Process Monitor which is among other things is a file and registry monitoring tool. This free utility is easily searchable on the web.

You can run the utility as you are running the msi file and you should be able to see all the events that are happening on the machine. Note that Process Monitor can capture hundreds of thousands of events within a few seconds so try and close any other processes to remove background noise.

Once you have your trace, use Process Monitor's filtering capabilities to filter on those events performed by the msi process. You should be able to any registry accesses by the process. If there's still a lot of events to go through then you may have to filter further. I suspect that, like in the article you found, that you will find the bloat occurs under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\ and whatever software that msi relates to.

Good luck.