Wisewiz

First, I'd search for [the software you're having trouble with] in HKCU\Software and HKLM\Software, and see whether you see a Debugger listed in that program's subkeys. If you find one, go back up a level in the tree and click File at the top of the screen, choose Export, and pick a name and a location for the .reg file it will create (so that you can find it again if you need it). Then delete the Debugger key, close the Reg Editor, and restart your computer. The problem with [the software you're having trouble with] should be gone. Another method is to search for CCleaner. After the Reg Editor finds the first instance, if Debugger isn't right next to what it shows, hit F3 and the editor will jump down to the next instance of CCleaner. Look for the Debugger subkey. Don't waste your time searching for "Debugger." There are gazillions of those in the registry, all of which are probably legitimate unless they're associated with CCleaner.

You may be right. But I run CC Professional in a "portable" mode (I eliminate Driver Up and perf Optim from the files, so that I don't have switches for those in my program window. I neither need nor want DU or PO, and I'd get rid of Health Check if I could figure out how to do it.) The result of my choice of operation mode is that I don't have PO showing in the Services list on my Win 11 Pro machines (22H2 963). I don't think that PO could be the culprit in my case. But that Debugger subkey completely broke my Macrium and, in the past few months, a couple of other programs. Deleting it restored normal function to the affected programs.

CCleaner keeps throwing "debugger" subkeys into the registry, and three times in the past four months I've had to search the registry and delete those CCleaner-related debugger subkeys in order to restore the performance of the affected programs. Yesterday, it was Macrium Reflect, and I spent several hours doing everything I could think of (including uninstalling and reinstalling) before I remembered the debugger issue. Sure enough, when I searched the registry for the main executable in the program, I found a debugger subkey that named CCleaner, and when I deleted that entry, the program performed perfectly again after a reboot. Could someone please comment (again?) on the debugger phenomenon, and why CCleaner kills programs with it?

I think I put that dummy file (0 kb) there a while back, when I checked “all settings in .ini” and saw a post somewhere that suggested that an empty portable.dat would keep CC from writing stuff to the registry. My bad. Well, at least I found it and suspected it might be the problem. Thanks for the help.

Used the Slim and rebooted and still had no Optimizer. Went back to examine the files in the CCleaner folder and saw that I had a copy of portable.dat in there. Deleted that, re-started CC, and behold! ... Optimizer is baaaack! Thanks for the help.

Odd, yessir. Will try your suggestion. No, I wouldn't touch another registry cleaner, and I use CC's reg cleaner VERY conservatively. I have only four categories checked in the reg cleaner settings. Thanks.

I have no Optimizer. What's the fix for this? I have the files in the CCleaner folder and the service in Services, but no Optimizer in the main app window.

On my fully compliant Windows 11 desktop, the animated "sweeping" icon that appears in the tray when CC is running has stopped sweeping. It just sits there. On my not-quite-compliant Windows 11 desktop, it still sweeps actively when CC is running. Both machines are running CC 5.90.9443. Any idea why my icon on one desktop would be lifeless? Both machines are running W11 Pro 21H2 ... 527.

Just an added note: My current CC Pro is not installed. This is the Win11 apps list, and CC is not there, but is running just fine on this PC.

I would appreciate some help with this: I want to use the portable version on my desktop PC and avoid having the registry entries that come with the standard installation, and since I have professional licenses, I want to enter my license numbers in the portable version's registration panel. I do not need the Driver Updater. I do not need automatic updating. I just want CCleaner Professional Portable, not the installed version. Any advice would be appreciated, except for the usual "it can't be done."

I don't actually think it will surprise you to know that millions of non-business users of the Portable version of CCleaner get their downloads from https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds, or to know that many if not most of those users choose the Portable version to avoid having to install the program, not to put it on a flash drive. There is a large and rapidly growing community of computer users who avoid software installs whenever possible, and a part of the reason for avoiding installs is the desire to avoid unnecessary additions to the registry.

After I installed CC Portable and then pasted my license into the space for it and registered successfully, so that I would have CCleaner Professional Portable, which was what I wanted, I checked the registry and found a new Piriform key in Current User and a Piriform key, with a LOT of data in it, in Local Machine. I have danced around this topic before on this forum without coming to any conclusion. I do not have CCleaner Portable on a flash drive; I have it on my PC's hard drive. But I would like it to leave my registry alone, so I make sure the box is ticked that calls for the .ini to be in the folder with the executable, and all settings to be kept there. It seems that it is impossible to have CCleaner Professional Portable, but I don't think I understand WHY. I don't care about the Driver Updater. I just want the other Professional features without the registry entries.

Andrei, Thank you for taking the time to respond. I don't want to pursue the point any further. I think I understand what happened.

I revived an old 2006 Toshiba Satellite Pro (AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core RM-70 @2.0GHz 4GB DDR2 @399MHz) last week, with two old SSDs replacing the original two Toshiba 180GB HDDs, and a new installation of Windows 7 Pro (activated), which I then updated (to see whether it would work) to Windows 10 Pro 64 21H1, and it's running amazingly well. I wouldn't know it was FIVE years old, much less FIFTEEN. [And Microsoft currently says my four- and five-year-old PCs aren't fit for Windows 11!] I have a CC Pro license for three PCs, and this one makes four I've got running now. I run CC Portable on the other three, so I put (Installed isn't the right word) CC Portable on the Toshiba, and it works great, but there's no Driver Updater, and then I got thinking, "I ought to have the new Driver Updater on this old machine, which probably should have some driver updates that Microsoft missed when it installed Win 10 Pro, and I would surely get the DU if I registered this CC as Pro," so I decided to go Pro, and bought a new CC Pro license. When I entered the new license code into the Toshiba's CC, it registered and changed the version to CC Professional 5.83.9050 (64-bit), but there was no Driver Updater. "Okay," I thought, "why isn't there a DU here? It can't be just because I'm using the Portable, because my other three are on Portable and have the DU." So I downloaded the non-portable standard Pro installer and installed it and registered it and behold! There was the DU! Then I uninstalled it and put a new copy of the Portable (which, you remember, all three of my other PCs are running) on the Toshiba, registered it, and had no DU. I wrote to the Manila, Philippines "Help" people, with a screenshot, and they didn't know why I didn't have DU, either, so they gave me a refund. Does anybody know WTF is going on? It can't be that the PC is physically incapable of supporting DU, because when I installed CC, I got DU on that PC. It can't be that DU is only available in installed versions (not portables), because I have DU on three PCs running portable versions.

It's all fixed now, and Device Manager and Speccy display the correct identification in both brand and size. A little Device Manager checking (Properties\Events tab) and a tiny bit of registry editing (Friendly Name, where necessary) and it's fine.

Actually, that should read "Windows is LESS confused than I thought, and its memory is longer than mine."

hazelnut, I hadn't thought about the possible effect of previously installed differently branded SSDs on the cloning process. You're absolutely right to wonder, and I'm now wondering why I didn't think of this. I'll absolutely check out the third SSD (without the cloning effect) when I put it into service. Thanks for thinking of this possible explanation for the mis-labelling. If I recall correctly -- and at my advanced age, that's far from a sure thing -- the one that's being called Hajaan is in a computer that originally had a Hajaan-branded SSD as its main disk, and the one that's being called a Samsung 750 120GB is in a machine that once had a 120GB disk. There is no Samsung 870 EVO 120GB currently (I think), but there WAS a Samsung 750 120GB. Well, woohoo! Thank you very much for wondering about what was obvious to you but not at all obvious to me. Windows is more confused than I thought, and its memory is longer than mine.

I agree, and I trust Samsung's verification of the disk. It stands to reason that if Samsung could see any evidence that it's bogus, they'd tell me in no uncertain terms, and urge me to replace it with a genuine Samsung product. I'm a happy camper, enjoying my stellar speeds but just still curious about the on-disk signals that Device Manager and Speccy are reading. After all, Windows doesn't use some magical power to identify your printer, your keyboard, your mouse, your USB drive, or your monitor; it reads the on-device information when you connect those things, if there is any, and labels them generically if there isn't any (e.g., "PnP monitor"). It's not a mystery that's going to keep me up at night, though. Oh, and I still have a third new Samsung 870 EVO 250GB SSD I haven't installed anywhere. When I get around to cloning my wife's current off-brand SSD main disk and installing the Samsung, I'll look with interest to see what labelling Device Manager and Speccy will draw from this one. Thanks for your support, Andavari. Dan

Well, I've installed and begun using one of my new Samsung 870 EVO 250GBs, and things are getting curiouser and curiouser: like the first one, this one is recognized correctly and called genuine by the Samsung Magician software, but this one is called a Hitachi Hajaan SSD by Speccy and by Device manager. I have no idea what's going on here. [Side note]: I had a Kingston 250GB as main disk and an old Sandisk 120GB as second disk on that machine. I used MR to clone the main disk to the new Samsung, then installed the new one and moved the Kingston to the second drive slot after I cloned the Sandisk to the Kingston. We're always commenting about how you'll see a marked difference in speed if you replace HDDs with SSDs, but for most uses, that speed increase is not as marked as it is when you use the disks for significant, time-consuming tasks. In my case, with the Kingston-Sandisk configuration, MR consistently took about 7.5 minutes to make an image of the Kingston disk to the Sandisk disk. The first thing I did after I swapped these disks in and made sure the computer booted properly and the drives were labelled properly was run MR to image the new Samsung to the Kingston. Three (3) minutes flat! Now *that's* a difference you can see! So I'm happy with my new disk, but I don't understand why it's being called a Hajaan.

Thanks, Nut. That was an interesting read. There are many electronics products on Amazon.ca marked "[Canada Version]" and for most of them if you read the "small print," you find that all it means is that the US-specific warranty doesn't apply. Fortunately, I'm no more worried about the warranty on a genuine (checked with Samsung and confirmed) Samsung SSD than I am about the warranty on my first COVID shot. Wait a minute. Maybe I'd better think that out again. Dan

Thanks for the observation, Anda. I didn't know that. It does make you wonder exactly why they would produce a country-specific storage device. Seems extremely unlikely that there's anything nefarious going on here. I think Samsung just goofed. We'll see what happens when my new SSDs arrive.

My assumption was that it was simply a mistake: the machinery that was churning out 750-120GBs was just not reset correctly to mark the next batch (the 870-250GBs) as such. OTOH, I do know where assuming gets you. Thanks. P.S.: On the Amazon.ca site where I purchased this disk, there was an odd note in the description: "Canada Version." I've never heard of Samsung or anyone else making a country-specific variety of storage devices, and it occurred to me that maybe the mis-labelled disks were unloaded to the Canadian market on purpose. In fact, I like the performance of this disk so much that I've ordered two more of the same for use in my other two PCs. It will be interesting to see whether the new ones arrive with the correct internal labels. P.P.S.: Amazon.ca ran out of stock for this disk, and was experiencing some delay getting new stock from Samsung. Maybe the mis-marked ones were EOTL, and the new ones will be correctly coded.

I have to wind up this thread by apologizing. I assumed that Speccy was misreading the disk, but it turns out that it was correctly reading the branding that's in the disk (internally). The mistake is Samsung's: Samsung has labelled at least some of its 870 EVO 250GB SSDs as 750 EVO 120GB SSDs, and the Windows Device Manager, the "wmic diskdrive get model,serialNumber,size,mediaType" command, and Speccy are in agreement about the label, even though Speccy has the correct specs listed as "Capacity" and "Real size" for a 250GB disk, and Disk Management has the correct capacity displayed. Samsung's Magician is probably working from the serial number, not the label. In any event, the disk is great, it's fast as lightning, and it has the capacity I paid for, so I'm going to live with the incorrect internal labelling. Sorry, guys. Dan

Thanks for the suggestion, JC, Will do.

New 250 GB SSD, verified as genuine by Samsung, but Speccy says it's 750 EVO, when it's really 870 EVO. Other specs software confirms 870. What's up?