I tend to avoid messing with the registry, so it was just a plain ol' ordinary cleaning with the default settings. As many times as I've used CCleaner, I find it kind of hard to believe myself, but for the (exact) timing of the problem. Given what CCleaner actually cleans and what it doesn't, is there any way for it to misidentify files or for some computer/operating system glitch to allow files that shouldn't be cleaned to be cleaned by CCleaner? I ask because I do remember something a bit out of the ordinary when I ran the test. Normally I hit "analyze", wait for it to complete, then hit clean. Well, I did just that, but as I was hitting clean I did notice an unusually large amount of data for one of the "categories" (for lack of a better word) in the summary results. I didn't think much of it at the time, nor do I remember any specifics other than that it was an unusually large amount of data. Anyway, as it usually takes a good while to clean my system, I didn't stick around and wait for CCleaner to finish, so I don't know how long the cleaning took, either (are there logs for CCleaner?). Regardless, thanks for the responses. I don't know if I'll ever know what really happened (my cat WAS near the computer at the time of the incident, so....) but I do know I sure don't want it to happen again.