Hi all,
Have been using CCleaner for a long time with no problems at all, great program, congrats to the developers! I've recently discovered a nasty bug in the Registry Cleaner module. My system is as follows:
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4850
CC: v2.13.720
Until recently, everything was working fine, Registry Cleaner was cleaning up everything nicely (or so I thought). A few days ago I run Catalyst Control Center (CCC for short ? the ATI graphics card control panel) to adjust some setting for the Avivo engine and I got a crash when selecting the Avivo Video --> Basic Quality panel. This was repeatable and happened even after rebooting the PC. Initially I thought it had to do with the drivers (they were v8.10), so I upgraded them to the latest version (v8.11). After completing the upgrade (but before running CCleaner), I checked CCC and everything was fine, no problems, no crashes! I then run CCleaner (always do that after (un)installations) and the Registry Cleaner found some ActiveX issues. I cleaned them all as usual, and then re-checked CCC. Bingo! The crash came back again! It seems that CCleaner cleans up some ActiveX registry entries that are needed by the ATI Catalyst Control Center.
See the attached screenshots for the offending ActiveX entries, and the CCC panel that causes a crash when these registry entries are removed by CCleaner. I suspect that this crash may also appear when running games or viewing video content that uses the ATI Avivo engine. I'm saying this because the CCC panel that crashes is the only one that contains a sample video (the one with the red "ATI" flag) that uses the Avivo engine to demonstrate the effects of the different settings. I think this is a serious bug that should be corrected in the upcoming versions of CCleaner. The crash always happens when some/all of the attached registry entries are removed, and affects both v8.10 and v8.11 (latest) of the ATI Catalyst Drivers, probably earlier versions too.
If any CCleaner users out there with ATI v8.xx graphics drivers can try the above and report if they too experience the same problem with Registry Cleaner + CCC panel. I have double-checked it on my system (see above for specs) and it is certainly repeatable.
Many thanks and once more my congrats for the excellent program!