dharris

Naturally that option would be necessary. I think a reasonable default setting would be to keep logs of the most recent 3-5 cleanings. I don't doubt any of you when you say that ccleaner doesn't blindly delete things looking like "temp" and doesn't go after things that aren't specified in the winapp.ini. However, my experience as a software developer has taught me that when there's a problem, the cause is likely the last thing changed. The fact that these files are shown as deleted at the same time as the stuff deleted from the directories that were cleaned by ccleaner seems too much of a coincidence. As for my particular problem, the files are too corrupted for Palm Desktop to read. One file recovery program suggests that the address book was 61% recovered. I'm going to ask Google about the particulars of this file format and/or dive into it myself. I can see plain text address info mixed in with non-ASCII characters -- presumably field delimiters or metadata. Then I'll whip up something to extract as much as I can. I did a Windows System Restore, but that didn't help. MS documentation lists the locations and file extensions stored by this utility and .DAT is not one of them. There are lots of lessons learned here for me: Never try new system utilities w/o backing up first. Perform backups more regularly anyway. Try the new software on a non-critical computer (i.e. not your spouse's) Thanks for your comments and help on this. Too bad it didn't work out better.

Everything new is saved under C:\Program Files\Handspring\UserName Nothing similar to temp. I realize that there's little anybody reading this can do. I would suggest to the author(s) of ccleaner that they increase the default level of logging. If there were a simple list of files which had been deleted, then I would gladly admit -- "hey, my bad -- these were under \temp"... but I have found nothing to back this up. If, on the other hand, this sort of log showed that ccleaner nuked files in an unexpected location, then the log file would be invaluable for debugging.

I've recovered some of the files using Restoration. Using a file viewer/editor, I can see that some of the data she wants is there, but as of now the Palm Desktop application isn't handling it at all. I'm inclined to believe that CCleaner did indeed do this. In Restoration, the modificied date of htese files is exactly the same as all the files which are localed under various Temp directories. What's odd, however, is that the full path show for these files includes a weird collection of non-ASCII characters. Investigating further...

I'm working on the recovery now. I'm pretty sure the files were in subdirectories under C:\Program Files\Handspring\UserName\ -- such as address\address.dat, datebook\datebook.dat I've booted using a Kubuntu linux livecd and have mounted the partition in read-only mode. Using a linux-based undelete utility, I see some of the files, but not the full file. For example, it claims that it will only be able to recover 61% of address.dat :-( Does CCleaner log its actions somewhere? I would really like some diagnostic information. I'm going to enable receiving email from other users. If anybody would like to send me a message for more immediate help, I'm available on all major IM networks -- I won't post my contact info here, but send me email and I'll let you know how to reach me.

Hmmm, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. My wife hasn't used the actual PDA for 6+ months, but she uses the Palm Desktop application to enter contact information, calendar events, etc. -- not to sync, but just as a PIM. So, today when she launched Palm Desktop (a desktop application running under Win XP on her laptop), the contact data didn't appear. Is it possible that ccleaner simply nuked some saved information from this app which resided in the registry?

No, in fact it hasn't been connected in many months. It's also a 5+ yr old device and wouldn't likely appear as a hard drive. Thanks for the thoroughness of your reply. I will look at the file recovery utility you mentioned. Doug

I ran ccleaner for the first time yesterday on my wife's aging laptop. I looked through the options of what it said it would clean, I ran analyze and reviewed the list of files that it said it would delete and then cleaned it up. Today my wife called me hysterical because when she tries to launch Palm Desktop to look up a contact there is nothing there. Typically it would just launch, but today it asked her to choose a user and there were no users listed! She looked in the directory where the files are stored and the key files appear to be empty. I feel like I screwed up royally for a number of reasons: I tried a new disk cleaner on my wife's computer first. I didn't backup critical directories (such as her palm data) She hasn't synced her (now dead) Palm in many months Tonight I'm going to try to recover the files from the disk using an undelete utility. I would appreciate any constructive suggestions, including (but not limited to) answers to any of the following: Have you ever had a problem with ccleaner and Palm desktop files? Will an undelete utility likely work? or does ccleaner really clean things up hard? Do you have any suggestions for good undelete utilities? Am I missing something key in ccleaner which will magically solve my problem?