"A lot of the registry clean out S/W has a reputation for not doing very much."
Most of those come close to being scamware. The only one I'll use is CCleaner - which is a freebie anyway. The others have too much ability to do damage - and to be truthful, simply don't work. Besides which, on a modern machine, knocking a few lines out of the registry achieves very little in speed gains
"an application that claimed to be able to actively search out the most recent drivers for my system"
But why bother? If a computer system is working, leave well alone. Only update drivers to solve a problem - unless you're a kiddy playing high-end games who needs to screw every last quantum of performance out of the machine
Otherwise, if the machine is working and stable, leave the drivers alone