Wisewiz

Yea, verily. And when I check License Key in the program, I see Expiry Date: Thu 10 Apr 25, which is exactly right. Yesss!

UPDATE (NEWS): They sent me a new key (finally) last night (21 Mar '23). It works. Nothing is broken; all is well; the program opens in a blink. Works on all three machines. An interesting thing: The new key they sent is in the old format: five groups of four characters each. They have matched my paid-for two-year renewal to the new key. Well, halle-damn-lujah! Thank you all, and especially @nukecad, for your help and patience. I think I'll never know what, exactly, caused the major glitch. Neither CC Support nor Cleverbridge said anything. Just a new (old-style) key. And so to bed. Au revoir, mes amis! Dan

We're barking up too many wrong trees, I think. I just used the new copy of Free I installed in the default way today. Opened in a blink to Professional, with the old key registered. Went to Options and substituted the new key. Broken. Subbed back the old key. Fine.

Yeah, I studied the files in the .zip, and I found all the stuff you found. None of it explains why this ONE thing makes a BIG difference. If everything else is the same, and the only thing you change is that one thing, that one thing is almost certain to be it. Thank you very much for looking into this. Back tomorrow. The folks in the Philippines are just waking up.

@hazelnut @nukecad If MBAM were the problem, you'd expect it to interfere with the unregistered CC as well as the registered-with-my-old-key CC. In fact, I've never had a problem with CC opening until I got this new key and applied it. Piriform is (rightly) proud of the speeds of its software functions. The original developer (I once knew his name and conversed with him a decade or more ago, when I was an active "helper" on the Major Geeks forums) would be mortified to hear that his program took as much as fifteen seconds just to open! I suspected something was wacky when I first registered the new key, and it took about 12-15 seconds to get accepted. I sorta remember that previous new key registrations were impressively fast. I just now registered my old key in an active copy of CC that was already registered as Pro with my new key. There's an option for changing keys in Option > License Key >Activate New Key, as you know. Well, registering the old key took about two seconds, if that. And, of course, as reported previously by your faithful reporter, CC bucked right up and behaved properly the next time I opened 'er. Something, sir, is afoot.

Yes, on two of the three, but the one that doesn't have it works as badly as the ones that have it. What I HAVE done is turn OFF MBAM (there's a switch in the systray JIC you don't have MBAM) before launching CC, and that made no difference. The switch stops all of the functions of MBAM and kills the service that supports MBAM. It was a good thought, though. Thanks. EDIT: Oh, and I'll remind you that all versions and all editions work well (with or without MBAM) so long as they have either NO key or they have my OLD key. Put the new key into the mix, and CC goes south immediately.

Thank you, m'fren'.

Well, I downloaded the Pro Trial edition after cleaning up everything I could find related to CC. When the standard installation completed, there was a notice that my trial had expired (as I expected would happen, despite my efforts to wipe all traces of CC from the file system, the registry, the Task Scheduler, and my User profile), and the program opened in the Free edition. I opened the new copy of the Free edition ten times. Each launching took no more than a second. Then I opened the program and went to Options > License Key, and entered my new key. It took about ten seconds, but my new key was accepted finally. I closed the program, waited a few seconds, and launched the program. There was a 15 second delay before the program opened. If anyone on the Mods bench here has any pull with the technical staff at Piriform, I would really appreciate some help with getting past low-level support and up to a technical level. I've been asked to run the CCleaner Support Tool twice, and I have run it and looked at the results. The tool requires that I start the program and then run the tool while the program is running. The tool shows nothing, because the problem doesn't arise when the program is running; the problem only happens before the program opens. My last resort will be to ask for a refund for my new license, then use my old license until I can get a new one under a new email address. That will cost me some extra bucks (if it even works at all), because I'll lose the discounts that come with renewals. Oh, well. Any advice from any of you experts?

Yeah, I agree about the licensing. But I think that if I used a different key and it didn't break the loading process, I'd have a case (maybe) for changing my current key or refunding my subscription for that key. I dunno. I'm not poor, but I hate throwing money away. I tried a Pro trial yesterday, with the standard installation, and it loaded and worked just perfectly until I went to Options > License Key and entered my current key. The next start took 15 seconds to get to the window. The Portable as Pro bit is just a "that's just me" kind of thing. Every time I see the Free title, I feel a little like a freeloader, but the Professional title puts my mind at ease, since I couldn't have it up there without having a valid license. Entering a valid license gives ANY version the Pro header. I'll try to get another Pro trial today, after I clean up every known trace of the current and past installs.

Thank you, nuke, for taking care of that. Cleverbridge kindly returned my payment for a single year pro license (on top of my current license—a failed attempt to get a different license key), but so far no one has suggested any remedy for my launch-lag problem, which, as you know, happens if and only if I register my new license in any version of the program. For now, I’m back to running the latest portable version, which would say Professional in its title if I entered a license, but it would struggle for 10-15 seconds to open then, so Free in the title is acceptable for now. I’m sure they are mainly holding back on sending me another key because they think there’s nothing wrong with my current one, and they don’t want to give me a second key for one subscription.

Thanks, Nergal. And Good Luck, Hmm.

Just to test the situation, I went online to purchase another key. I figured I could get my money back if the new key didn't work, either. It turns out it's not that simple. They require my email address in order to send me a product key, and (surprise!) when they sent it, it was the same faulty key. Now I'm in a struggle to get my money back, and the communication from Support and from Cleverbridge all keep going around in circles. Form letter after form letter arrives without indicating that anyone has read and understood my complaint.

Just now uninstalled registered Pro and installed 6.10 Free (unregistered). Loading is just as fast as always (before I renewed my license and started using the new key). If Support can't do anything for me, perhaps I should just stick with the Free on all my machines. All I want (use) are the custom clean, the registry checker, and the system restore checker. The only advantage to having the Pro versions all these years (for me, at least) is that I have the satisfaction of knowing that a valuable member of my computing arsenal gets my monetary support. (Once I have determined a new program's usefulness and value to me, I try to make a habit of supporting its developers.) I unintentionally lied in a post above: there is one other program on my machines that has a long loading lag. Malwarebytes (Premium, of course; see sentence above) has always been very slow to load, in all the years I've used it. No problem, because the user seldom needs to open the program console once it's set up properly. CCleaner, OTOH, is a program that I open at least once a day, before shutting down at night. Yeah, I also have a keyboard shortcut that launches the executable with the /AUTO parameter, but I usually want to open the console and run the Analyze function instead, to see how much crud I've accumulated during the day.

Did it yesterday, but so far I’ve had nothing back but form letters from the Philippines. The UK folks are awake now, so we’ll see. The loading lag with freshly installed AND registered Pro is 15 seconds this morning.

No blocks at all for those. Hope you sleep well. You’ve been very patient and supportive. I’ve written support and given them a brief description of the situation. Hope to hear from them tomorrow (my time).

Quote: Can I ask (just for a bit more info); is your old key one of the 24 digit ones (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX) and presumably the new one is the new 20 digit style (XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX)? That's right. It looked ODD to me when I got it, but, of course, I didn't know the key style had changed. I just had this new, odd-looking key. It worked. But CC broke after I finished registering it on all three machines (to get rid of the hounding reminders on all three machines with the old key. It's just a theory at present, but all the evidence so far points to a problem caused by (introduced by?) my new key. The new key breaks things. The old key doesn't. The new key breaks old versions. The old versions are fine with the old key. This behavior is seen on three computers, with two versions of Windows, and with a whole lot of differences. Nobody else is reporting this problem. What's distinctive here is the malfunction (which first appeared yesterday, when I renewed my license and got my new key) associated with my new license key. If you mods wish, and since this appears to be an individual problem on my machines with my license, I won't mind at all if you delete this whole conversation. Idiosyncratic malfunctions don't need to be seen on the forum. Your choice.

Yep. 6.10 with old key takes a moment longer to load than I would expect, but comes up loaded with all the "Expires soon" stuff that probably slows down the load a tad. Then I went to Options and entered the new key. Registration successful. Closed and re-opened, and counted to 15 before the console appeared. Can I get a new key that I can register and see whether I get my old, snappy, instant-loading CCleaner back?

Installed 6.10, had no lag, registered yesterday's new key, and SHAZAM!, LAG, baby, LAG.

I just now used my old key (only a couple of weeks left on it) on the latest install (6.08 Free), turned it into Pro, got all the usual "Your license is about to expire" warnings right away, and HAD NO LAG with the old license turning this into Pro. I'm not sure I can manage to re-install 6.10 without my new key showing up, but I'll give it a shot.

Okay, mods, an update of interest: I went and got an installer for Free v. 6.08, put it on, and started. Instant, as always before this yesterday glitch began. BUT THEN, I registered my new license key and turned Free into Pro, and the same damned lag came back. If you haven't had a zillion complaints about this lag (i.e., nobody else is experiencing it), I'm thinking there's something wrong with my key. If CCleaner is checking the validity of my key every time I open it, that could account for the lag. @nukecad: I'm using neither PO nor Winapp2. Since this happens with my new license (just paid for yesterday) on all three registered machines, and DOESN'T happen on my main PC with unregistered installations of CCleaner, I'm thinking I got a faulty key (if that's possible from Cleverbridge). I'm going to try another installation without my key registered, and then with it registered. BACKSUN, as Owl says in Winnie the Pooh.

I've now re-installed pro from the link Cleverbridge sent yesterday, uninstalled that and installed Free from the Builds page. Tested load times, then registered my license to turn Free into Pro. No change. Long lag loading.

Six seconds from click to console. Notto goodo. Not a single other program on these PCs is showing any lag at all.

what kind of going offline would you like me to try? On how many computers?

I have never seen a lag before on any version of CCleaner, but with this update, I've got a doozey! It happens on all three of my (licensed) computers, two on Windows 11 Pro, and one on Windows 10 Pro. The lag was about six seconds at first, but now it seems to be growing, and my last count was 14 seconds between the clicking of the icon and the appearance of the console window. This justifies fast action and a new - repaired - version.