CCleaner 2.16.830 takes a very long time to start up because I have a large number of large Firefox profiles.
Firefox 3.0.5
Win XP Pro SP3
Dual 600 MHz PIII processors
1 GB RAM (of which 500 MB is usually Available, according to Task Manager)
Since my configuration is unusual, I'm afraid this report might wind up being just an FYI, but I want to bring this behavior to the CCleaner team's attention. Perhaps they can provide a fix in a future release. I also want to validate the experience of anyone else who experiences a long CCleaner startup time when they have a large Firefox application folder. Of course if anyone else has discovered a work-around for this, I'd be delighted to hear of it.
For a long time now, at least a year perhaps, it has taken CCleaner 2 to 4 minutes to start up. I scanned for malware with several different programs, defragged, and temporarily disabled my Avast AV run-time checking, but the problem persisted. I have plenty of free disk space and I checked the condition of both my drives with SpeedFan. They're both in very good condition, with no read or write errors in their SMART history.
Finally I ran across this post from last May, Firefox app data folder., Is there a reason for checking the whole firefox app data folder?. I used the Sysinternals Process Monitor to examine the real-time file system activity done by CCleaner. It confirmed what member madouros reported last May, i.e. CCleaner checks every single sub-directory in the Firefox application folder, D:\Documents and Settings\Alan Baxter\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox. No wonder it takes so long for CCleaner to start up! (I'm embarrassed it didn't occur to me to check it out with Process Monitor sooner.)
I do a lot of Firefox extension testing and currently have 45 different Firefox profiles, including backup profiles, all of which CCleaner checks during startup. Each profile has approximately 61 extensions installed. Process Monitor logs CCleaner using 135,553 file system events to examine all of the 13,280 folders in the Firefox sub-directory tree. I've tried excluding D:\Documents and Settings\Alan Baxter\Application Data\Mozilla\*.* in CCleaner's options, but that doesn't make any difference. Too add insult to injury, since I don't want or need CCleaner to clean Firefox, I have disabled Firefox cleaning by unchecking all of its boxes in the Applications > Firefox/Mozilla section. Still have the same startup problem.
I'm painfully aware that my Firefox environment isn't typical, and it's understandable that CCleaner hasn't been designed to provide a reasonably short startup time in this case. I wouldn't be surprised if the CCleaner team hasn't even tested it with a setup like mine. Does anyone else besides madouros and me have such a large Firefox application folder?
