Someone in a thread in some forum somewhere had said that when keys and values get removed from the Windows registry, they are in fact, still staying there, but the links to then are terminated so a new value or key can use it, and if necessary new links can be created.
This implies that deleting a value won't help in security because some 'undelete' software can retrieve all the keys that ever got deleted. And, it would mean that the files holding the registry can never shrink in size, but get bigger, even when things are deleted.
Is this true? And if so, does MS (or someone else) provide a utility to 'defragment' the registry?