Once you find your cookies, they are simple text files, although the "text" is not usually very readable. You can "back up" the cookies you want to keep just by copying them somewhere else. This lets you "clean out" by deleting all of them, and then copy the good ones back.

The only difficulty with this is that some cookies have an "expiration" built in, so that they are supposed to delete themselves after a certain time, and you may end up restoring "obsolete" ones if you don't update your keepers occasionally.

You can do a backup "legally" in IE under File - Import/Export, and select export cookies to file; but you'd want to do the export after you've removed the trash. Put them back with the same utility, just select import cookies.

For cleanup, if you don't recognize it, you don't need it. The worst that will happen is that you'll have to log in somewhere if you accidentally delete one that might have been helpful.

John