I've noticed that while using a registry/hdd trash cleaner that when I reboot Sonar X3 all of my VST's are out of commission. What's strange about this is that while I ONLY clean what's on my C:\ drive, it does NOT blow away the VST paths that point to my C:\ drive, but ONLY blows away the paths that point to the separate partitions where I store all of my VSTi's, and FX.  So, obviously there's some kind of instruction in Sonar (whether it's an INI file or what) on my C:\ drive that points to the other drives, and tells the cleaner to delete THAT, and NOT the paths that point to the C:\ drive.
 
Now, I know there's a bunch of folks that are going to read this and have 1 or more of the following responses.  So, here's my response to those ahead of time, and I think my responses are quite reasonable, and I would appreciate a thoughtful serious debate on this, instead of smartA$$ remarks that really add nothing to the discussion.
 
1.) So, for the response of "Well, why do you insist on cleaning your registry/hdd, especially, if it does what you say it does?"  
Answer: Because just like DAW have known for years that defragging your hard drive makes for much better/faster throughput, especially when working with many multitracks, and 32-64Bit realtime FX.  So, the same principle applies with your registry.  The more useless crap you have in your registry, the longer it takes for your processor, AND HDD to find, and access the correct data, no matter how fast your system is.  In addition, the cleaner I've been using has a timer that tells you how long it takes for your system to boot.  Now, as you can see in my forum signature, I've got a significantly better than avg system, and when my system is operating at it's optimum I've seen it boot in as little as 19 secs.  THAT'S FAST! Yet, because it takes so long to reset my VST's AND the drum maps, I've avoided cleaning my system for just 1 week, and already it has slowed down to a 65 sec boot time. THAT'S SLOOOWW!  That also tells me there's a LOT of crap that needs cleaning, and a lot of room for improvement. I didn't pay what I did for this system to be that slow, and I don't think any of the serious users here would disagree with me.
 
2.) The other response I'm anticipating is: "Well, if you don't want to reset your VST paths, and you say the ones on the C:\ drive remain intact after cleaning, why don't you just transfer all that's on the other drive to your C:\ drive?"  
Answer: Well, as I stated in the previous response, because 1 of the universal needs in our technology is SPEED...AT EVERY TURN!  Further, if for some reason my C:\ drive crashes that means I have to remember all of those VST's, and settings, blah, blah, blah in order to re-install. Also, that's just that much more the C:\ drive as to deal with.  And as I eluded to earlier, the way the drum maps are set up causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time reassigning maps....and that's if you CAN remember what the assignments are. Now, if they added a Print opt, or something that could save EVERYTHING on the map, as in exactly what s'ware, or h'ware synth you had mapped to any given sound, that would be a HUGE step in the right direction.  Also, while I don't use the Step Sequencer that much, it only stands to reason that those settings would also be blown away.
 
So, as for viable solutions:  First of all, I'm not trying to make Cakewalk out to be the bad guy, I'm just trying to find a happy solution.  So, I looked in the Settings for the cleaner for a way to exempt the "other than C:\" map from being blown away.  Not there.  I agree that writing their tech support might offer a solution, however, I still think it's a much easier route to pursuit to find the setting in Sonar that points to that path. 
 
I'm going to send this to CWalk Tech Support, and see if they can shed any light on it, as well as Harmony Central.  If there are any other ideas I'd really appreciate it.
 
Tanx,
KC

Since you have the argument with yourself completely covered, I figured you don't need our help and will likely come up with the world's first strawman solution to cober your preemptive strawman argument. I'm sure you are bery grateful to you and thank you in advance.

The data left over in the registry is so small that it should have almost no impact on modern systems.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/are-registry-cleaners-necessary#1TC=windows-7
 
If your system is slowing down by 50 seconds on boot after a week, something is seriously wrong with your setup or you have rouge applications.. My home DAW boots in 9 seconds (after BIOS Post) and has for 6 months. Its specs are just under your system too.
 
I worked in support for 4.5 years and talked to thousands of customers. I've never experienced a user where there SONAR performance was increased in any measurable way after using a registry cleaner. Though I did have lots of people claiming SONAR just stopped working and after a lengthy investigation, the customer mentioned they ran a registry cleaner. We don't support or advocat for the use of registry cleaner applications. 

Seth has the right of it. I've done computer support professionally for about 15 years now and in precisely zero cases have I seen a registry cleaner be useful or recommended one. The registry is just an optimized database of settings. Specific things in it are not accessed unless there's a reason, and access to a specific key is fast. So extra data in it is of no real consequence.
 
That is not to say there are never problems or reasons to remove something. If there is a particular setting in it causing an issue, you remove that. But it is the kind of thing where you remove a key because you've tracked a specific problem to that, not just because.
 
You may clean you registry if you like, but it will at best do absolutely nothing in my experience. At worst, it could break your system by deleting a key that is important.
 
I'll leave you with a quote from bash.
 
<t0mato> anyone here knows how fast will my computer run after a registry cleaning?
<x5ga> We have a formula to calculate the percentage of speed gained
<x5ga> (E*c/100)*a
<x5ga> E is the number of errors cleaned
<x5ga> c is the number of cores your CPU has
<x5ga> a is 0

OK! First to address the juvenile, useless drab of dubdisciple.  I kindly requested that useless, insulting drivel like yours be avoided.  I asked a COMPLETELY legit question that was well articulated, and thoughtful (which is more than I can say for your spelling).  SO, PLEASE KEEP OFF OF THIS THREAD, unless you have something useful and constructive to add, OR I WILL REPORT YOU TO THE ADMIN.
 
Now, to Seth, and Sycraft.  Gentlemen, I sincerely appreciate your support experience.  I also appreciate your patience in reading my fairly long post.  However, I too, have been in tech support for 20+ yrs, and I've been using Cakewalk since it's inception when it's founder was writing code in Winston-Salem, NC, 1.5 hrs from my home in late 80's.  Not trying to win a spitting contest here, but my thoughts about the registry, and how it works were taken from this perspective.  That if you're looking for something in an actual VERY crowded physical filing cabinet, even if your fingers move at lightening speed, you STILL have to look through most of what's in it lest you don't see it, and have to look again, and again.  Now, I know computers don't have to "look again, and again", but you get my point, I hope. But another point you overlooked regarding cleaners is cleaning up unneeded crap on hdd, not just the registry.  That I KNOW FOR SURE, and if left unattended can eventually hinder the speed quite a bit.  And, yes, I'm aware that SSD's do NOT need defragging, but they DO still accumulate significant amounts of trash.
 
That being said, my other overall point in posting in the 1st place was if anyone knew of a setting in Sonar that I could change so that it does NOT point to that "other-than-C:\ drive" path, and delete it out of the VST scanning process.  There's obviously something telling it to, when it doesn't touch the paths pointing to C:\.  If you're not aware of such an animal, I understand, and gratefully appreciate your effort in assisting me, as opposed to dubdisciple.
 
Thanks,
KC

King Conga
OK! First to address the juvenile, useless drab of dubdisciple.  I kindly requested that useless, insulting drivel like yours be avoided. 

And this is definitely useless, insulting drivel.
If you don't agree with a reply, please at least be civil.

King Conga
I've noticed that while using a registry/hdd trash cleaner that when I reboot Sonar X3 all of my VST's are out of commission. What's strange about this is that while I ONLY clean what's on my C:\ drive, it does NOT blow away the VST paths that point to my C:\ drive, but ONLY blows away the paths that point to the separate partitions where I store all of my VSTi's, and FX.  So, obviously there's some kind of instruction in Sonar (whether it's an INI file or what) on my C:\ drive that points to the other drives, and tells the cleaner to delete THAT, and NOT the paths that point to the C:\ drive.
 
Now, I know there's a bunch of folks that are going to read this and have 1 or more of the following responses.  So, here's my response to those ahead of time, and I think my responses are quite reasonable, and I would appreciate a thoughtful serious debate on this, instead of smartA$$ remarks that really add nothing to the discussion.
 
1.) So, for the response of "Well, why do you insist on cleaning your registry/hdd, especially, if it does what you say it does?"  
Answer: Because just like DAW have known for years that defragging your hard drive makes for much better/faster throughput, especially when working with many multitracks, and 32-64Bit realtime FX.  So, the same principle applies with your registry.  The more useless crap you have in your registry, the longer it takes for your processor, AND HDD to find, and access the correct data, no matter how fast your system is.  In addition, the cleaner I've been using has a timer that tells you how long it takes for your system to boot.  Now, as you can see in my forum signature, I've got a significantly better than avg system, and when my system is operating at it's optimum I've seen it boot in as little as 19 secs.  THAT'S FAST! Yet, because it takes so long to reset my VST's AND the drum maps, I've avoided cleaning my system for just 1 week, and already it has slowed down to a 65 sec boot time. THAT'S SLOOOWW!  That also tells me there's a LOT of crap that needs cleaning, and a lot of room for improvement. I didn't pay what I did for this system to be that slow, and I don't think any of the serious users here would disagree with me.
 
2.) The other response I'm anticipating is: "Well, if you don't want to reset your VST paths, and you say the ones on the C:\ drive remain intact after cleaning, why don't you just transfer all that's on the other drive to your C:\ drive?"  
Answer: Well, as I stated in the previous response, because 1 of the universal needs in our technology is SPEED...AT EVERY TURN!  Further, if for some reason my C:\ drive crashes that means I have to remember all of those VST's, and settings, blah, blah, blah in order to re-install. Also, that's just that much more the C:\ drive as to deal with.  And as I eluded to earlier, the way the drum maps are set up causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time reassigning maps....and that's if you CAN remember what the assignments are. Now, if they added a Print opt, or something that could save EVERYTHING on the map, as in exactly what s'ware, or h'ware synth you had mapped to any given sound, that would be a HUGE step in the right direction.  Also, while I don't use the Step Sequencer that much, it only stands to reason that those settings would also be blown away.
 
So, as for viable solutions:  First of all, I'm not trying to make Cakewalk out to be the bad guy, I'm just trying to find a happy solution.  So, I looked in the Settings for the cleaner for a way to exempt the "other than C:\" map from being blown away.  Not there.  I agree that writing their tech support might offer a solution, however, I still think it's a much easier route to pursuit to find the setting in Sonar that points to that path. 
 
I'm going to send this to CWalk Tech Support, and see if they can shed any light on it, as well as Harmony Central.  If there are any other ideas I'd really appreciate it.
 
Tanx,
KC

 
 
Are you using Plugin Manager and do you have a personal, or custom Plugin list saved?
 
It seems as if SONAR is looking at the default locations on it's Plugin scan while missing the other locations because your Plugin Manager isn't set up to find the other folders which you prefer to use. The answer to your question may be that you are looking for the Plug In manager and the settings found within. Plugin manager has a odd way of making you think you have made a custom list when your settings are just sort of in a state of limbo. Make sure you actually "save" a custom Plugin list and make sure that your projects are actually using that list.
 
Or perhaps I don't really understand your question and my answer is naively simplistic. If so, I apologize for not following the idea you are trying to convey.
 
Good luck.
 
 

I think CCleaner could be a good alternative to any registry cleaner. Just don't use the registry cleaner part of the program and it will only clean useless stuff. This program is not completely safe I have heard so be careful with it. I have never had any problems with it though.

Lmao. I was just trying to help :)

King Conga
OK! First to address the juvenile, useless drab of dubdisciple.  I kindly requested that useless, insulting drivel like yours be avoided.  I asked a COMPLETELY legit question that was well articulated, and thoughtful (which is more than I can say for your spelling).  SO, PLEASE KEEP OFF OF THIS THREAD, unless you have something useful and constructive to add, OR I WILL REPORT YOU TO THE ADMIN.
 
Now, to Seth, and Sycraft.  Gentlemen, I sincerely appreciate your support experience.  I also appreciate your patience in reading my fairly long post.  However, I too, have been in tech support for 20+ yrs, and I've been using Cakewalk since it's inception when it's founder was writing code in Winston-Salem, NC, 1.5 hrs from my home in late 80's.  Not trying to win a spitting contest here, but my thoughts about the registry, and how it works were taken from this perspective.  That if you're looking for something in an actual VERY crowded physical filing cabinet, even if your fingers move at lightening speed, you STILL have to look through most of what's in it lest you don't see it, and have to look again, and again.  Now, I know computers don't have to "look again, and again", but you get my point, I hope. But another point you overlooked regarding cleaners is cleaning up unneeded crap on hdd, not just the registry.  That I KNOW FOR SURE, and if left unattended can eventually hinder the speed quite a bit.  And, yes, I'm aware that SSD's do NOT need defragging, but they DO still accumulate significant amounts of trash.
 
That being said, my other overall point in posting in the 1st place was if anyone knew of a setting in Sonar that I could change so that it does NOT point to that "other-than-C:\ drive" path, and delete it out of the VST scanning process.  There's obviously something telling it to, when it doesn't touch the paths pointing to C:\.  If you're not aware of such an animal, I understand, and gratefully appreciate your effort in assisting me, as opposed to dubdisciple.
 
Thanks,
KC

Well, I think the analogy is a bit flawed. When a program (specifically SONAR) asks the registry for something it calls out a specific path 
 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software\SONAR\X3
 
It's not looking through the entire registry on each call and it's not bound to the physical realm. It's only going to that one key. Your cabinet analogy is fun, but it's not entirely accurate because it's contents will never be put back in out of place (your drive could be fragmented though). Also, the registry is only a maximum of 102MB. While that could have been quite big 10-20 years ago, modern computers just do not get bogged down with files of this size. Especially since we've changed standard formatting of hard disks and indexing has improved. This all coincided with moving to the Windows NT base with XP/Vista.
 
Defragging your system drive, and with it the registry file, will do far more good than trying to clean it. There's no safe way for these applications to know what's okay to remove. This is why SONAR installations get hosed after a registry clean.
 
Some good updated info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner