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Something really confused the Registry Cleaner


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I've used CCleaner for five or six years; maybe too many since I've obviously become complacent although it's worked just as I expected ever since I first installed it. I run the /auto every night, and occasionally ran the Registry cleaner when the sprit moved me or I'd installed or uninstalled a program.

 

But a week or so ago, the registry function found hundreds of things it didn't like - even though the computer appeared to be running and working normally. I let it 'fix' the 'problems' it found - did I mention I'd become complacent? - (after telling it to do a backup) and immediately found that many basic functions no longer worked. Internal file types such as .msc, .bat, .scf, were "Unknown file type", even from the run command line, and a few of the application software associated files types I tried such as .xls were no longer associated. A reboot didn't help. So, proceeding on "What's the last thing you changed?", I restored using CCleaner to restore what it had removed, and rebooted again.

 

At that point, most things seemed to be working normally again (and still are), but... IE7 would load but never display anything but a blank page and wouldn't let me change the URL to browse. Luckily FireFox worked normally. After trying to figure out what might be causing IE7's blank page problem - and failing - I finally uninstalled IE7 (which dropped me back to IE6), downloaded and reinstalled IE7, and that problem was fixed. But there are now two sites that IE7 can access but FireFox can't - standard non-descriptive error message with no details about why a login fails.

 

I've checked all my cookies, (and flash cookies), compared my IE7 and FF settings with my other computer which has continued to work normally, updated from 3.07 to 3.08 when it notified me that the update was available, but... a registry scan still finds the same huge list of 'bad' things if I scan with Missing Shared DLL's, Unused File Extensions, or ActiveX and Class Issues checked. Almost all of the 'bad' entries it finds have something to do with HKCR, but I don't have a clue what started this whole mess other than a vague suspicion that the last time I ran a registry scan was before the last patch Tuesday. In any case, CCleaner appears to mistakenly find errors when the system is working normally, and the restore from a CCleaner save does not appear to have fully restored what it 'fixed'.

 

XP Pro, SP3, patched up to date. And to anticipate the question, both McAfee and MBAM say my system is clean.

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The changes are the registry cleaner finds more stuff now as of a few versions back, it finds too much in my opinion but that's already been discussed to death in other topics. So many people put in suggestions for a stronger more aggressive registry cleaner from CCleaner now they've got it.:rolleyes: You can always right-click to add any entries individually, or all at once into the Exclude list.

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The changes are the registry cleaner finds more stuff now as of a few versions back, it finds too much in my opinion but that's already been discussed to death in other topics. So many people put in suggestions for a stronger more aggressive registry cleaner from CCleaner now they've got it.:rolleyes: You can always right-click to add any entries individually, or all at once into the Exclude list.

 

I could buy that and even happily embrace that... since it would suggest that a 'stronger and more agressive' CCleaner might have found the real problem in my registry instead of all the symptoms of that problem CCleaner now finds. And if I didn't have two almost identical PC's with the same XP, same apps loaded, and almost mirror copies of data files, I might have had an easier time tryng to figure out what -and when, and why- things went south. CCleaner in One PC began to find what it thinks are hundreds of problems, for reasons I'm still trying to discover, and continues to run as it always has in the other.

 

In looking back over what I wrote, I dawned on me that I told my story of what happened but didn't really ask the question I needed and wanted to: I'd bet that something made one (or a very small number) of changes in the registry, or perhaps in the file system, which made CCleaner think it needed to 'fix' the huge number of entries it now thinks are errors. But those registry entires CCleaner now finds are apparently valid - and severely cripple Windows if removed.

 

Since I don't have an in-depth knowlege of the registry, all I have to work with is the save CCleaner did before I let it 'fix' what it found, and several older full regsave files. Someone better trained and experienced than I am might be able to discover what all those CCleaner save entries have in common, or what missing or damaged between an old regsave and a current regsave, but... that's way above my head. It might, however, be nice for a CCleaner designer/programmer to know why it failed the way it did - especially since there is obviously some problem with my registry. I'd attach the CCleaner save file here, but it's an 8Mb file. And of course, the full save file is over 100Mb.

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