Dave CCleaner

@bwer1233: I would be curious to know the nature of the injury that you believe has been done to you, and the remedy that you would be seeking? If you bought a home-use licence of CCleaner Professional in 2018 or later, when we started selling CCleaner by subscription, the term was clearly stated in the product selector, cart, item description and the purchase receipt, eg: Assuming that you purchased a home use licence of CCleaner Professional in 2017 or earlier (when new purchases were not yet on a subscription basis) there was indeed no term listed. Naturally, I can see how that would be problematic if a term was then subsequently applied to the continued use of the product that was purchased - that's changing the rules mid-game, moving the goalposts, "not cricket", etc. However, as I have attempted to clarify on several occasions over the past 12+ months, no such term was retrospectively applied, and no such term will be applied in the future to such "legacy" licences. So if the remedy you are seeking is that your right to use the home use product that you purchased in 2017 or earlier not be subject to any time-based limitation now or in the future - done!

sì.

@APMichael: FYI, this has been in the development backlog for a couple of months, so it has been on the devs' radar. It was mentioned in passing in a meeting I was at earlier this week that it's now actively under investigation in the current development sprint, so depending on whatever code complexities and inter-dependencies may be involved that probably means that it will bubble out at some point over the next couple of releases.

@JSS3rd: common trick is to buy the discount licence on sale as well and then send support a licence merge request - then you'll have 2 years of CCleaner

The "buy me" popups will generally only appear a few times a year - and only if there is a noteworthy sales on. They will usually contain words like "sale" or "discount" or "price" and have a call to action button with a word like "buy" in it. Sounds like what you are referring to is not the pitch to buy the Pro version, but the service notifications telling you, as a free user, that there is a new version of CCleaner available for free download - eg: if you are on 5.67 now that 5.68 has been released. There is a plain text one that pops shortly after the new version is released, and if you are more than a few versions out of date there will also be some higher visibility ones titled along the lines of "Your CCleaner is out of Date" and will have a call to action button with words like "update now". Clicking may take you directly to the free download or it may take you to a page where you are invited to take the opportunity to also upgrade to the paid version - if this happens and you are not interested in buying then you can "nope" your way through to get to the free download that you're after. We always recommend that our users update to the latest version, or at the very least never fall more than 6 months behind. Cleaning is a perpetually moving target, with new releases of the software and OS that we clean up after meaning that if you fall too far behind with your CCleaner version then our effectiveness can start to diminish.

So that big white empty box in OP's first post looks like the "would you like fries with that" screen in the installer. Just for some context, the free version of CCleaner is subsidised by showing ads to some users on a CPA model - if enough users say "yes" to the fries (currently either Avast free antivirus, AVG free antivirus or an Avast VPN trial) and they use it, like it and eventually end up buying it then we earn enough to keep the servers running (or, better yet, as we did last year, start replacing the ones that were creaking at the seams with shiny new ones). Previously that was a banner at the bottom of the first screen of the installer that some people would miss and accidentally say "yes" to fries that they didn't actually want and then would immediately uninstall it - which meant that they didn't use it, didn't like it and certainly didn't buy it. So we didn't get paid and the users got angry, which was a bit of a lose-lose situation all round. So we overhauled the whole thing and put the offers on their own screen* with clear accept and decline buttons and as a safety measure the whole thing served as a single object so that in the event of a slow internet connection or some other connectivity mishap there should, in theory, be no way that a user could skip through the process without seeing the "fries" offer. So while in a way it is "good" that the safety measure seems to be working for @R_Ansar, even on the slowest internet connection, the ~100kb of frame content should not take so long to load that it would take more than a couple of seconds for the content to appear. Unless the server had temporarily choked - but even then I would not expect to see it happen on multiple install attempts. * yeah, we know, except for the Chrome offer. While that is also on a CPA model (you have to actually use the thing before we get paid), that's a whole 'nother thing and still work in progress because of Reasons. That was the timeframe when we rolled out this new offer layout (from the 5.64 release in March of this year). @R_Ansar: did you have any problems with installing CCleaner on version 5.62 or earlier at any time prior to September 2019? Okay so that doesn't sound like one of the "outdated AV" issues we've seen with some third-party AV software. @R_Ansar: Do you have a firewall running that might be blocking the server that delivers this content? Any edits to the Windows hosts file to NULL-map any of our servers so that they can't be reached? Although using the "slim installer" cuts out the "fries" screen, if the root cause is a blocking of the servers then this may lead to some oddities using the product itself after it is installed, as the same servers that deliver the "fries" content are also used to serve up some of the in-product content as well. @jamieresearch: okay that is another layer of odd since there is no "fries" screen on the slim installer. Is blank screen the first one you see? Or the second one after the one with the licence agreement, customise link, etc? Could I trouble you to screenshot it for me please?

All excellent suggestions, and you will be pleased to know that we already thought of them. It is, admittedly, not particularly well labelled, but you can retrieve information on all of your licences, their registration information, expiry dates and download links at any time from https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup by providing the email address that you used when you purchased CCleaner. Note that since this is sent to your email address there is no need for a separate password to access this information. (This is by design - we know that users recycle passwords between systems and we really don't want to be responsible for looking after millions of them.) That would have been frustrating - so I am probably going to be worsening your irritation level by telling you that you didn't actually have to go through that. Read on to find out more ... A couple of months before a customer's licence is due to expire, we start actively promoting early-bird/customer loyalty discount offers - both by email and pop-up messages from the CCleaner product itself. Generally speaking, the best value offers are only available to existing customers, but if one of the public offers catches your eye then of course feel free to grab it at any time. If it is the same level product that you currently have (CCleaner Professional to CCleaner Professional, or CCleaner Professional Plus to CCleaner Professional Plus) or it is an upgrade (CCleaner Professional to CCleaner Professional Plus) and you do this within 90 days of when your existing licence is due to expire then the system will assume that your intention was to use this as a renewal, and will credit the remaining time from your old licence onto your new one. Outside of this period the system does not make such assumptions, but if you email the CCleaner support team (support@ccleaner.com) from your registered email address with "merge licences" in the subject line somewhere we have people managing a constant stream of these requests. See here for details: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039530092-Will-I-lose-any-time-on-my-subscription-if-I-take-an-offer-to-renew-early- One glaring omission from the CCleaner product console, however, is a "renew" button - you have to wait until one of the renewal offers pops up, which might not always be at the most convenient time. The designers have been working on how this would be best integrated into the product console over the past few weeks and prototypes went through user testing earlier this week. I would expect to see this appear in the product in one of our releases later this year. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. Handling the licence and subscription management is indeed part of our core business, but the transaction processing is best done through a specialist online reseller. If we don't want to be looking after passwords then we really really do not want to be looking after credit card numbers. That only makes sense for large enterprises doing over $1B a year in transactions, who can absorb the overhead of properly managing their own in-house e-commerce platform, or small businesses under < $1M a year. Anyone in-between is asking for trouble ...

If you have picked up a copy of CCleaner Professional or Professional Plus at an introductory discount then the following year of the subscription will be billed at the full price - ie: the strikethrough price when you ordered. In the US this is currently $24.95 (plus sales tax) and $39.95 (plus sales tax respectively). While introductory discounts are common with any subscription, it is always irksome for existing customers to see lower prices out there for new customers - so starting a couple of months before that renewal hits you'll get a couple of member-exclusive discount offers - keep an eye out for those. That only really applies to the "legacy" customers who bought before 2018. For everyone who bought since then it is supposed to be a hard stop if you let the licence lapse - although we had a grace period which got itself temporarily extended given the current economic circumstances.

If you cannot see the duplicate finder, could you screenshot what you seen instead in your CCleaner console? It should look something like this:

Both the free and the Paid versions of CCleaner are in German ... and French, Italian, Russian, etc. If you have installed either the free or paid versions without setting your desired language, you can always change it under Options > About > Language

What exactly did you have in mind? Cloud backups are probably things best handled by Google Drive / OneDrive / etc.

... and done.

... and it looks like we managed to implement a fix earlier today. For previously impacted users, the trigger for the renewal reminder popups should now sync correctly with the licence expiry information shown in the product. @Zappenduster @markusdnx: let me know if this pops up again prematurely.

Check https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204043844--Problems-activating-or-registering-CCleaner-Professional ... when copying and pasting might you be including any stray spaces before or after your licence key or name?

@Gordon206: root cause found - fixes coming, follow this thread for updates:

So it looks like this happens under a certain set of circumstances after a manual renewal where the new expiry date shows correctly in the licence information screen but the old expiry date gets "stuck" on the client. Hoping to get a proper fix in for CCleaner 5.69 (version 5.68 is already being queued up for release) but in the meantime we're looking to do a bulk flush of all such cases on the licence server to fix all currently impacted users over the next few days.

@markusdnx: In your case I note that you have two licence keys: one starting with PZZ4 that expires in April 2022 and one starting with PM3A that expired in March of last year. If you go to Options > About > License Information, can I confirm that it is the PZZ4 and not the PM3A key that you are using on the machine getting that expiry popup? If you are using the PZZ4 key, when is the last time that you rebooted your computer?

If you download the Professional Plus installer (link in your confirmation email after purchase) then you should be greeted with this on the second screen after you select your language:

You can also cancel autobilling through the subscription management accessible via Options > About > License Information in your copy of CCleaner.

Did you purchase a new licence at some point (or take an update when you renewed) and get a new licence key? And, if so, is that key the one that you are using? (You can see all of your licence information with expiry dates, etc at https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup) What expiry date is displayed in Options > About > License Information?

Not really abandoned ...

With a user base larger than the size of most countries, and a couple of billion installations over the years I suspect that if CCleaner was secretly installing Chrome to 84% of users it probably would have been noticed by now. That said, with so many possible configurations of computers, there is always the possibility that something will go weird on a small percentage of them. If you can provide some additional information that might help us track down what might have caused a buggy install experience: Which version of CCleaner did you install when you noticed Chrome appear? Did Chrome start immediately after you installed CCleaner, or some time afterwards? What version (and build if Windows 10) of Windows are you using? What antivirus and firewall are you using (brand and version)? Have you configured your firewall to block traffic to specific domains? Are you using a screen reader or any other form of assistive technology? Do you still have Chrome installed? Is there anything in the registry key \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Common\Rlz\RLZs? If so can you paste it here please?

At the moment the "something else" could be Avast AV, AVG AV, CCleaner Browser, Avast Secureline VPN ... or again, in a large percentage of cases, nothing.

Sounds a bit like an error we had with the licensing server last year that it would report expiry when it was down - but even during outages it should no longer be doing that. Can you confirm a couple of things for us please: When you say "in the license information" you mean the information showing from https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup? Or from Options > About > License Information in the CCleaner console? Are the errors that pop up text-only windows in the middle of the screen, or alerts in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen? If the latter, do they refer to your licence being "expired" or being "invalid"? When did the last one appear? Is it possible to grab a screenshot next time it pops up? Have you had any other licence keys other than the one that you are currently using (ending with U84F)? Which Windows version are you using? And which version of CCleaner?

You will not get something that has not been offered. And you will not get something that has been offered if you do not accept. Three possible scenarios: If Chrome is offered and you accept -> Chrome installed If Chrome is offered and you decline -> no Chrome installed If Chrome is not offered -> no Chrome installed (but maybe offered something else instead on a later screen)