Microsoft has made available for download a tool designed to ensure that software installed on top of various Windows operating systems gets updated correctly. The Patch Registration Cleanup Tool is a utility offered by the Redmond company free of charge with a rather self-explanatory name. Designed to clean the patch registration errors, the tool went live on the Microsoft Download Center on October 12th, 2009 and is currently up for grabs for all users of Windows XP, and later releases of Windows, including the latest iteration of the Windows client.

“On a computer that has a Windows Installer based product installed, you may receive an error while installing an update for the product and the installation of the update may fail. Installation errors caused due to incorrect patch registration may be corrected using this tool,” Microsoft informed.

According to the Redmond company, end users will be able to run the Patch Registration Cleanup Tool not just on Windows 7 RTM, but also on older Windows platforms. The software giant pointed out that the following Windows operating systems are supported by the tool: Windows 2000; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Vista; [and] Windows XP.

There are no less than three downloads associated with the Patch Registration Cleanup Tool, all .EXE files labeled PatchRegCleanup. Support is offered for 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) flavors of the operating system enumerated above, as well as for Windows server platforms running on IA64 architectures.

As far as Windows 7 is concerned, end users will be able to take advantage of the tool with the gold build of the OS come next week. On October 22nd, 2009, Microsoft will release Windows 7 for the general public. The official launch is expected to take place in New York and to feature Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

The Patch Registration Cleanup Tool is available for download here.