These CAN be such a thing as over-maintaining your computer.

Recently, I have had several instances wherein an application that is very important to my ability to make a living was ceasing operation, after running my usual maintenance procedures. I generally run a drive cleanup utility(as Windows can create tons of cruft files that just take up hard drive space, especially when Instant Messaging programs like MSN or Yahoo are in the mix) once a week, or after I have installed new drivers. In my case, I had just installed the latest Nvidia video drivers. Nvidia driver installation can leave a lot of temp files and slack registry keys laying about.

For quite a while now, my maintenance plan ran like this: Wise Disk Cleaner, Wise Registry Cleaner, RegVac as a second registry cleaner and to re-compress the registry down to its smallest size(something it does very well indeed...) and then Perfect Disk, which also defrags system files at boot time. My computer ran trouble-free with that regimen for years.

Recently, however, my new work-at-home job necessitates the use of the Citrix Client for Web-Hosted Applications. With this, my employer can push applications necessary to my job out to me after logging into their secure servers. This little client is all that stands between me and the unemployment line and it has become the my computer's reason for existence. And mine, truth be known.

All of a sudden, I found myself being plagued by the Citrix client ceasing operation, not working when I logged in and tried to fire off a Citrix application. At first, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason for this. Surely, this was totally random and I had found some bizarre misbehavior between Windows XP x64 and the Citrix client. Right?

No. XP x64 and the Citrix app were getting along fine. I was over-maintaining my computer.

Armed with a good baseline backup image, created by Acronis True Image, an exported registry on my backup drive, a large iced coffee(Columbian, if you must know...) and a quiet few hours on a Saturday, I delved into what was causing this behavior.

It was Wise Registry Cleaner. Every time I ran it, Citrix stopped firing off successfully. Luckily, the author of Wise Registry Cleaner included a very good registry backup and restore utility in this program. Clean the registry with Wise: Citrix fails. Restore the original registry backup: Citrix works again. Clean and compress the registry with good ol' RegVac: computer runs fast and Citrix works.

The point of this is that you can overdue maintenance of your computer to keep it running at peak efficiency so you can more-effectively perform your appointed tasks. First, I would suggest that all who run the Citrix Client for Web-Hosted Applications avoid Wise Registry Cleaner like the plague. Even after it does its thing, you cannot restore functionality with a simple reinstall of the application. You must either have a registry backup you can reinstall or a disk image(I have learned, the hard way, to not rely on a Microsoft System Restore; it's a crap shoot at best and fails at restoration a good 50% of the time).

Next, if you must perform regular maintenance(and I suggest it. An un-maintained Windows computer is a Windows computer on the way to failure), use good programs that play nice with Citrix applications. For cleaning the registry(an important and necessary part of said maintenance) I am sure that there are plenty of programs out there that will not cause problems like the ones I faced. That said, make sure that when you try them, you are setup and ready to go to restore your registry and if necessary, a full and operational system image.

stuck wondering if I should install IE8 and whether I should clean my files and cookies weekly!

I have AVG as an anti-virus and Ad-Aware too. Is this enough??

Windows can quickly turn any small job into something that pays less than minimum wage. The value of Microsoft Windows specific experience seems to decay rapidly too, so it's harder to write anything off as experience.

That said, thanks for the heads up!