Thanks, though not sure I am parsing your reply correctly.
To rephrase my questions... What I am after is setting up a default config where nothing is "cleaned" by default, no matter what machine ccleaner is later run on. And, where manually enabling a "clean this" target would work just as if the option were never turned off.
( That can't be done via ccleaner.ini alone, since it only holds settings for the machine it is originally being set up on. But CCleaner has many of its 'clean' options enabled by default, and a different machine may well have programs installed which don't show up in the original ccleaner.ini, yet are enabled by default for cleaning in its internal winapp.ini/winsys.ini/etc. )
I thought I could work the "turn all off by default" part by having winapp1/winreg1/winsys1.ini files based on the embedded ones, with just default= changed to =false. But the official docs make no mention of "winreg1" (or winreg2, for that matter). Also, many of the builtin .ini entries make use of a SpecialKey1= entry that the other official doc says doesn't work in external .ini files - which, taken at face value, would mean that a custom winapp1.ini file could never truly duplicate the builtin "clean" action, even if the user later checked the option.
So, my question again, is the official documentation incomplete (about winreg1.ini) and wrong (about syskeys), or is it really not possible to force a clean-slate do-nothing base configuration?