I relied on IE options & ATF before I made the decision to use CCleaner after much research in other forums. I only recently found the option of cookies in Spybot after reading some old posts because I was losing my home page settings. I do not have many cookies that I want to keep so it wasn't a big deal to save them in Spybot & CCleaner. After giving it more thought, & reading the responses in this thread & forum, it does make sense that cookies are not hidden like malware can be where you would need to run more than one cleaner. Also I wanted the confirmation that just because a cookie is protected in one program, it is not protected in another. I hope that others that may be scratching their heads on losing wanted cookies, take a look at what other cleaners they are using.