Ars Technica did a nice little bit about Microsoft charging scareware vendors. At the center of the debacle, Registry Cleaner XP. Registry Cleaner XP, along with a host of other programs, are labeled as Scareware. The idea behind them is that they scare you in to believing that you need them or else your computer won't work properly. Have yourself a look-see. Just don't click the scan now button.

http://www.registrycleanerxp.com/

I'm going to run through this program just a little bit to see what it does.

Now Ars Technica mentions that no matter what you do, if you scan your PC, the program will find something to fix. I ran it and it says that it scanned 17405 registry keys and found 43 errors.

What it didn't know was that I was running the program in Linux under wine. Linux has no registry, period. The registry is a travesty and the open source community won't have it. Wine emulates a registry so that programs that need a registry can find something, but my registry is all of 12458 lines. Which means that the 17405 number that Registry Cleaner XP came up with was complete fantasy.

Another feature Registry Cleaner XP has (or perhaps fails to have?) is a Messenger Service popup "blocker." Supposedly if I click this little checkbox, I won't get any more messenger service popups. Now supposedly Microsoft fixed this issue with Windows XP Service Pack 1. It's a pretty simple fix. Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services. In that window find Messenger in the list that you're shown. Double click it. Click stop. And in the drop down menu, set it to Disabled. Poof, no more messages.

I can't actually test to see if their blocker works because...
A: Linux doesn't have the Messenger service
B: Wine doesn't emulate the Messenger service.
C: Registry Cleaner XP will only allow you to check this box if you buy the full version.

I think when I get home, I'll throw it on my honest and true Windows XP machine and see what it does.