On Windows98, Microsoft had a built-in utility for shrinking the registry, but on Win2k, there is no such utility that I could find. It’s not so much that the registry takes up a whopping 58 megs last time I checked it, it’s that it loads into memory, and so the smaller the better.
Warning: run at your own risk!
I found two freeware utilities that do wonders for shrinking and defragging the registry:
NTREGOPT will optimize your registry for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP. It will not remove any registry keys, it just rewrites the registry, and dumps any deleted data. When I tried it, it meant going from 58MBs to 42MBs.
PageDefrag goes ahead and defrags the actual registry and paging files, on your actual hard disk. You only need this utility if you are running WindowsNT or Win2k. XP already does this automatically.
To check the registry size on Windows2000, go to My Computer, Right-click – Properties – Advanced – Performance Options – Change – Registry size – Current registry size.