Is there anything under the Maint. tab that should be run often?

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Yes, only use it in case of a table corruption.

Repair/Optimise is rewriting most of the table information. Like with any writes, corruption can occur (worst case). A bad sector on the disk, a process crash, etc.. might leave your table totally corrupted if it happens in the middle of a repair/optimisation.

If you really want to optimise your tables, the best way to do so would be to create a backup of your database, delete and recreate the database and restore again.

a normal "optimise" does nothing more then merging consequtive emtpy blocks.