AKAJohnDoe

If it is already possible, please let me know how. Otherwise, could these registry entries be cleared automatically?

Well, I stand corrected. It just happened again on a manual clearing of Firefox within Firefox, although upon restart I did not loose all my settings. So, CCleaner is almost certainly not directly involved. My current (and one of my last) theories is that ZoneAlarm is involved. This is actually a pretty good theory as: It has happened without Firefox running The entire PC is locked up, not just one application It began around the time that ZoneAlarm updated for the conflicker virus I have begun noticing some dmp files for VSMON now and again Thanks everyone for your help, assistance, and patience. This thread may be closed.

The internet settings are OK. This is really starting to look like a conflict between having CCleaner clearing Firefox and Firefox clearing Firefox on Vista...

This morning I re-enabled the option in Firefox to clear private data at exit. I still have the Firefox-related options in CCleaner disabled.

Already ran chkdsk (and scandsk, too). No difference. But a good suggestion. From my experience, this has all the markings of two or more products being involved in some particular sequence or timing. There would have been more reports of this than the handful I have found if it were simple, right? I'm hoping I have the configuration at this time that is a "known good" so that it can be used as the control group set. If I can stumble upon a "known bad" configuration in addition, figuring out the trigger(s) will be a snap.

Since making two changes, this has not recurred on my machine. The two changes were: Unchecked the box in Firefox to automatically clear Firefox Private Data when Firefox closes, although I left all the boxes for types of private data checked. Unchecked all the boxes relating to Firefox in CCleaner I am still manually clearing all Firefox private data within Firefox via shift+ctrl+delete regularly. I am going to run this way for several more days to see if the problem happens again (or not). If it does not, the next step would seem to be to re-check the box within Firefox to clear Firefox Private Data when Firefox closes and see what happens ...

One other factoid: UAC is on and active, although I run under an administrator account rather than a limited account.

Will do. There are a number of possibilities and I am simply systematically evaluating each of them.

Thanks for your help. If it was a simple lockup I might be more suspicous of a driver issue. And there is nothing in the event logs. Also, the only application that seems to be affected is Firefox. And it has been affected even when it was not running at the time. If it were not an intermittant problem it would also be easier to resolve. I have set all updates (Windows, ZoneAlarm, Firefox, CCleaner, ...) to either not update or to only notify me when updates are available so that I can make the choices as to which and when. The lockup is like a disabled spin loop. Right now I have the clearing of Firefox turned off in CCleaner, but on in Firefox (although not automatic; I have to manually initiate it). If the problem persists it pretty much eliminates CCleaner, but not Firefox nor ZoneAlarm nor Vista itself. I take it that this is the first you have heard of this?

I have been experiencing an intermittant lockup for several months now. I am running Vista/SP1. At first I thought it was Firefox, as it appeared to begin around the time 3.0.7 came out; however, that was also the timeframe when ZoneAlarm was updated for the conflicker virus, CCleaner was updated as well, and IE8 went GA. So you can understand my predicament. Everytime it happens I get the spinning orb, none of those not responding messages, no response from any mouse clicks or keyboard input. The only recourse is a hard power off. When it restarts, Firefox has lost all it's customizations. Although the add-ons are still installed, they have no settings. I thought I had it narrowed down to somehow being related to clearing private data in Firefox using the Firefox facilities, but then it happend (once) without Firefox running. Then I updated to the beta of Firefox (3.5b4). Happened once again. Still, I feel it may be in that area somehow, So, to that end, I have disabled clearing of Firefox in CCleaner. I am exploring a hypothesis that there is a conflict between the way Firefox clears private data and the way CCleaner clear Firefox private data. So, a round-about way of getting to the question: Is anyone else seeing similar behavior?

My point is that programmatic registry cleaning is never "needed", although I do perform registry cleaning regularly myself and have found that the registry cleaners I do regularly use are generally reliable and accurate.

It is not really my place, to advise you on a forum that is run by those who write the product; they know far more than I. However, I can tell you what I did to arrive at the conclusion I did. I searched (just Google, nothing extraordinary) for several of the words in those entries (yours had things like dshapeline and such). I saw quite a few hits for Publisher. Now, you do not have Publisher, per se; however, you do have Works. There could perhaps be some commonality there. My own opinion is that registry cleaning, while it is something I regularly do myself, is not really all that neccessary. A little clutter in the registry is not going to matter to the performance of your machine. Conversely, removal of needed registry entries can have a major negative impact on your system. Most folks do not have a well thought out and tested backup and recovery scenario, so for them, erring on the side of leaving entries that are unknown is probably safer. I am a neatnik and an organizational fool, so I go to great lengths to keep my machine orderly. All that said, I removed the entries from mine and have had no apparent ill effects (yet). Also, now that I have made my opinions on registry cleaning clear, I also want to go on record as saying that one of the other major components of CCleaner, the cleaner tab itself, used wisely, can have a tremendous impact on the performance of your system. By regularly cleaing out, well, the crap, and then by weekly, or a couple of times a month, defragmenting the drives, one can achieve and maintain a well-performing system. I've not found many products, free or cost, that do as good a job at this as CCleaner.

Do you have Microsoft Office? If you poke around in your START/PROGRAMS list, do you find an entry for Publisher, probably under Office, but perhaps separate?

I cannot be certain without actually looking on your PC, but it appears that many, if not all, of these entries might be associated with Microsoft Publisher ActiveX, VB, and VBA controls. Do you use that program? Did you perhaps have a trial version that came with your version of Office that you never upgraded to be able to use? Did you maybe uninstall publisher or upgrade it yourself to a newer version?

Knowing your way around the Windows Registry truely helps. As for Vista ... The first Windows OS (excluding DOS) I ran was Windows 2.1, and I have all those in between. I have been running Vista since June of 2007 and you could not pay me enough to go back to XP. Too many holes and inconsistencies.

I looked into the registry on my PC and decided that the enties were in fact unneeded on my PC. There are a lot of entries under HKCR\INTERFACE still; this did not delete many of them at all. And, HKCR\INTERFACES has been around at least back to Windows/2000 as a registry entity.

I was OK with that one being there, actually. It even showed up under JV16 PowerTools when JV16 PowerTools was run in it's most aggressive mode. And, as stated, it was an empty registry tree. The others were the ones I wanted to check out in more detail.

I did not want to leave anyone with the impression that I consider CCleaner unreliable, or that I consider JV16 PowerTools more reliable. I consider them both to be reliable. I simply encountered a discrepancy in what one product found vs the other product, which for me is an indication for me to express some doubt until further information can be gathered and analyzed.

I evaluated those entries shown in my post above on my machine only and determined that those entries on my machine were probably safe to permit CCleaner to remove from my machine.

I evaluated these entries and am fairly confident that they are OK to clean out.

It is the paid version. And I have found them to be quite reliable. Regardless, It seemed prudent to call this to attention in case it was an error or problem as the most recent change was an update to CCleaner. I find having both products provides that "reasonableness check". Not "accusing" CCleaner of anything, just wondering if in fact it is correct and reasonable; these entries the new version finds that the old version and the competing product do not find. That is all.

JV16 PowerTools

Yes. I, too, am concerned about these entries found by the registry cleaner. They are not found by another reliable cleaner ...

The Event Viewer logs in XP were no big deal, there were only four or five of them. However, in Vista there are DOZENS and it is a bother to clear them all manually. It would be an exceptionally welcome enhancement to CCleaner to have the ability to clear all the Vista Event Viewer logs all at once.