The following is a short list of some of the most common registry errors and symptoms that users experience when a corrupt registry occurs. These are the types of errors that should prompt you to use a registry cleaner like regcure, registry easy or registry mechanic for faster and more accurate results.

1. Random Stalling - for no apparent reason your system freezes up making it impossible to do anything at all, in some cases only the mouse will work but you aren't able to click on or open anything. Sometimes it only takes seconds, other times it is a permanent freeze that requires you to push the power button, which is also dangerous as you could cause the system to become even more unstable. These symptoms do not usually display specific registry errors.

2. Sluggish Performance - Applications you often use, take long to start up and/or some programs close abruptly with some random or bogus error. What used to take 10 to 20 seconds to start up now takes easily a minute or more. Also switching back and forth between applications takes longer and causes your computer to freeze or crash.

3. Windows Crashes - While performing a normal activity such as running Microsoft word, viewing web pages with Firefox or Internet Explorer, or editing files your system crashes and it does this sporadically but on a daily basis. This is usually the sign of a corrupt registry. You system may also not display any registry errors before crashing, usually you end up on what is known as "the blue screen of death". A blue background that display some tech jargon about the problem your system is having.

4. Applications fail to launch - programs that you use often now stop working all together. This is an indication that your registry entries for this application have changed or are no longer valid, so when the application tries to load, the OS is unable to determine what start up files and drivers are associated with this application, so it crashes the application and this usually does display a registry related error and you can also view more specific information via the event viewer.

5. Add/Remove programs tool fails - uninstalling applications is usually a straight forward operation, but when the registry is corrupted, you could encounter an error in which you try to uninstall a program and it just won't go away, the errors that you get are often vague or completely unrelated. This means that windows is unable to determine where the references for this program are on your PC, which means that your registry has lost those references. These are some of the most annoying registry errors, there is no direction and makes it hard to troubleshoot.

6. The event viewer is full of application and hardware errors - your PC can in many cases still operate normally, but that never actually means it is in good health, your system could be leaning towards disaster and the way to find out is to check your event viewer often. In it you'll find all the errors and warnings that windows records about anything it detects that's wrong. Not all hardware and application errors end up in a PC freeze or crash. But checking this log often can give you clues about what's going wrong and needs attention. Registry errors are not usually recorded on this log only symptoms that can reveal trouble.