marmite

Thank you for your 'opinion' ident, but rest assured that I'm perfectly familiar with good practice in software deployment. But regardless, your comments affect my argument how? 'An installed folder' ... in the context of my previous post ... meaning one introduced by the installer. Who mentioned the program files directory? How about we stop hijacking Tex's post with this game of tennis and just agree to differ on this one.

Microsoft to issue emergency patch (date not yet known) ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/mi...mergency_patch/ Meanwhile Opera and Firefox get more trade ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/20/op...st_ie_warnings/

Thank you

Ah ... so this is the one everyone's been waiting for? I'll hang on to Avira for now and watch with interest

Of course it would be defensive if it's a folder created by the application installer that you don't expect the user to be playing with! By 'fail', I obviously don't mean fall flat on its face. But if an installed folder went awol I might choose one of several options. I might create the directory. But equally I might put out an error that says 'folder doesn't exist blah, blah blah'. I might just stop execution and log to the App Event Log. It all depends on the application and on the program requirement. It's not just black and white. In some systems the very fact that a folder has disappeared could be indicative of a serious problem - you wouldn't want to hide that by just blindly recreating it and carrying on as though nothing has happened. And if you're running in batch or as certain services you can't just 'tell the user'.

My guess is that all but the last are in the 'ActiveX ...' category. You don't have to do one-by-one - you could do a few at a time. Because you're doing it carefully and backing up every time, you should be okay. You have already demonstrated that by successfully going back to a working state. Some members recommend that you only clean category-by-category anyway. CCleaner's registry cleaner is fairly safe; it's unlikely you're 'breaking' anything else. I guess if I was you and I was going to work through your particular problem I would make a note of everything you initially elected to clean. Uncheck all of the boxes and then add in your cleaning categories one or two at a time. Try selecting the 'ActiveX' and 'Installer' categories first (assuming they were ones you selected originally) and see if your problem recurs. If it does you know it's in those categories. If not, add a couple more, etc. But of course you don't have to clean any of it ... you're not likely to get a massive performance gain for example.

And now MS tries to turn it into an 'opportunity' ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/mi...rity_nightmare/

Hi Roma Haven't seen this, but the answer is clearly there in your saved registry file - which is a very good start! If no-one comes back and says they've seen this before, try either or both of these approaches: * Look through the reg file for anything related to IE, to ActiveX controls or to the installer package (when you say random do you mean it's different each time?). * Clean the registry on a category-by-category basis until the problem recurs - that will help to narrow the search down. The last saved reg file will then contain the offending key(s). Even if you can't then spot it, it will narrow the problem down if you need to post the results back here, for example.

If I write a program that creates a log (or any other) folder on install I don't expect some muppet to arbitrarily delete that folder. Neither do I necessarily expect to have to code that defensively that I'm gonna recreate the thing if it 'disappears'! It all depends on the nature of the app; but you can't apply a blanket "that's wrong". User-specified folder locations may be handled differently, but not necessarily things that are part of a default application installation.

Seems like it's just too much for some ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/avatar_death/

Let's say application A creates temporary/junk files in folder X. Folder X must pre-exist because of the way that application A works. User wants to clean all files in this folder and supplies the appropriate syntax to CCleaner, then runs CCleaner. Application A now fails because folder X has gone. That would have to be a reasonably common or at least a very plausible scenario. Unless there is alternative syntax to specify whether or not an empty folder should itself be deleted I think it's safer to leave it there. There's no overhead to an empty folder.

Following the Germans there then. If the government of either country were to bother to issue guidelines to "surf safely and securely" and "don't engage in illegal p2p activities" (the source of many users' problems from picking up infected files) it would be far more constructive. If the population bothered to follow that advice then it would save far more grief than just changing browser for a week or two 'cos someone's found an exploit that 'may' be on one or two out of the zillions of websites out there. IMHO advice issued by those governments to home users is tantamount to scaremongering. I guess I can see more of a case for businesses being more alert because it's targeted emails that seems to have caught company employees unawares in the 'Chinese assault'.

It's probably nothing serious (or 'malicious') but it would be good to know what's causing it because it's certainly not behaving how it should. Apart from checking that the card is seated properly I can't think of anything else to check offhand ... if it were me I'd do a bit of googling around and see if I could find any clues that way.

Ah! I see what you mean now after Andavari's post I think the main point from an MS point of view is to upgrade to IE8 as far as that vuln. is concerned. But that aside I'm looking forward to getting my hands on W7 ... like Andavari I want a new PC first though

Sorry ... it's the network card that allows you to connect via a LAN (ethernet) cable ... you probably have a socket on your PC somewhere. If you always connect via wireless then you may never use this. Most PCs and laptops come with this type of connection ... https://spaces.umbc.edu/download/attachment...87/lan_port.jpg

It's actually gonna be to IE I believe; 6, 7 and 8 are affected though by default 8 has better protection (with DEP enabled by default). Check out Microsoft's mitigation suggestions if you want to check/tweak your own configuration ... http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...ory/979352.mspx

Have you installed a new LAN network card? If not maybe your existing card has become loose within the case?

Good commentary on the sophistication of the Chinese attack. Malicious, but very clever.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/15/ie...loit_goes_wild/ and http://www.us-cert.gov/current/index.html#...advisory_979352 ... and the German government goes wild too ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8463516.stm

Hey, but you discovered it yourself .... best way to learn

Hi Groonx I know where you're coming from. I always wipe anything 'personal' that I don?t want or that I have archived else where, whether it's family photographs or a pdf copy of my passport page or financial details. File wiping I don?t have an issue with. But surely it's better to use a tool like Eraser to wipe files (directories) selectively when you're done rather than to repeatedly wipe your entire freespace. This takes longer and increases the wear on your drive. I'm sure if you're disciplined (which I presume you are if you're working with that many documents) that the files are (or could be) in a few specific areas of your drive. Alternative ... use (something like) TrueCrypt and work inside a large encrypted file container. Every so often (or as often as you like!) you can just bin the entire thing and you automatically have 'wiped freespace' and you're also working in the knowledge that your work is protected until you do decide to delete it. Or even use TrueCrypt to encrypt your entire hard drive! @kroozer ... I understand that in France personal encryption is actually illegal. In the UK it is not. Though the 'authorities' can demand access to encryption passwords if they feel they have cause. Recently a guy has been imprisoned for not doing so ... he claims just on principle.

You can use Window?s own Task Scheduler to do this - I don?t think you?re likely to see it in CCleaner for a while.

Not an answer to your OP, but for information .ico files are icon files. Shortcuts have the extension lnk.

It hasn't removed (uninstalled) the actual hotfixes - they are still there. But because 'hotfix uninstallers' was checked, CCleaner has accordingly removed the uninstaller packages ... so you can no longer uninstall the hotfixes.

Why? The only reason I would want to wipe free space is to wipe a file or files that I really, really wanted to delete securely but had inadvertently deleted normally.