Dave CCleaner

Dr Web has a tendency to false-positive our new releases for the first 24-72 hours after release. They tend to respond quite promptly though to feedback from us and from their users about corrections though.

We managed to mangle several languages recently. This has all been fixed by the developers, but deployment of the fixes did not make it in time for yesterday's 5.63 release. 5.64 will come with the languages fixed and is intended for release in a couple of weeks.

As a general rule of thumb, if out of ~70 AV engines none of the major ones detect anything and you only get flags from a couple of engines that you have never heard of before, the chances are that you're looking at a false positive. Old version of CCleaner prior to 5.58 were prone to this (detection of the Google Toolbar optional installer, before we got rid of it) but we still get the occasional hit from engines that are prone to autoflag any binaries that are new to them (we release every month) or have behaviour monitoring heuristics that look upon the CCleaner's functions with suspicion.

Have you tried the Uninstall tool within CCleaner to remove it?

@AlecosHave you tried updating your CCleaner?

CCleaner is compatible with the current release of Windows 10 as of CCleaner 5.46 and above. That said, if you are on anything other than the latest version of CCleaner (5.62) you may find that it is not cleaning everything as well as it should, as there have been quite a few cleaning rule updates and additions in the past 16 versions.

@iamaliveCurrently the licence server seems most likely to go on strike around the same time as breakfast in the UK. I just checked on the licence server and you have a key ending with UZPC that expires in October 2020 and seems to have been successfully activated once - if that is the one that you are using then indeed it is most likely that the licence server is the culprit here. We are hoping to swap over to a new server in the next couple of weeks - after which the old server will be thrown into the same dark flaming pit for troublesome hardware as the old speccy server was earlier this year recycled in an environmentally conscious manner.

@18june: Great to have you back. The privacy concerns were in mid-2018 and sorted out shortly thereafter. Fixing this was the right thing to do for our users (since we are both a performance and privacy tool after all) but the right business decision as well - needlessly collecting any personal information from users is just a risk and a liability for any company with users in Europe. With regards to the Chrome offer, that started back in 2010, so is not exactly new. It's not under the installation customisation options but, when offered, is in a banner down the bottom of the installer screen. While a lot of users have trained their fingers to uncheck before "next"ing their way through installers, we know that others miss it and end up with an extra installation they weren't expecting. While the third party offers in the installer help keep CCleaner free for millions of users worldwide we only get paid if user installs and uses the product in question - so unwanted installations that enraged users immediately uninstall are no good for anyone. For this reason we announced back in May that we are changing the way these offers are presented to be more obvious and to prevent this from happening. After a couple of months of low-key testing we've launched a larger scale pilot of an explicit "Accept/Decline" presentation in CCleaner 5.62 which seems to be making people much happier - we'll be rolling this out full scale in the very near future.

Does not seem to be present on the builds page https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva/builds. It was there a week ago. Will check if it was temporarily withdrawn for some reason or if the page has suffered from bitrot (the latter is more likely)

@atttim: Looks like there may be two separate matters here. With regards to your licence I note that you have two separate 1PC CCleaner licences. There is one ending with a key ending with QZPC that expires in March 2020 with subscription switched off and another that ends with WZPC that expires in September 2020 which does have a subscription active. I assume that you are using one licence key on your laptop and the other on your desktop PC? You should see Auto-Extension enabled for one and disabled for the other. With regards to HealthCheck, I take it that this is what you are seeing: Does the Software Updater (under the Tools menu) still work for you at the moment? Would your have set up any firewall rules that might be blocking CCleaner functionality? Specifically the healthcheck.ccleaner.com web service?

Depends which installer experience you are currently getting - the optional offers may display differently. If you have the old one, you would uncheck "Yes, install CCleaner Browser" before installing (or leave it alone if it is already unchecked). If you are getting the pilot of the new installer (in CCleaner 5.62) you would get a separate screen with "Accept" and "Decline" buttons on a separate screen.

Health Check is essentially the next generation of EasyClean, which also incorporates additional CCleaner functions into a single flow. In 5.62 a preview version is going out to a small percentage of users with a full rollout (most likely with some additional tweaks based on user feedback) planned in an upcoming release. Note that the first time you use Health Check there are a few extra screens to click through before cleaning/tuning starts as it runs through an explanation of what it is to first-time users. This one-time introduction should not repeat on subsequent uses and you can go straight to the analyse and clean operations. As with EasyClean, many users are finding this a more convenient way to clean and also like the all-in-one approach to cleaning, improving startup speed and running Software updater, rather than hopping around different parts of the CCleaner console to accomplish all of these. Also as with EasyClean, we expect that some users will want to stick with the familiar way of doing things, so the traditional cleaning (retronymed to "Custom Clean") and other functions will remain available to those who prefer that experience. For version 5.62 the Health Check preview flag is in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Piriform\CCleaner and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Piriform\CCleaner as "(Cfg)HealthCheck". "1" is on and "0" is off.

@Songan: Our licence server has been a trifle temperamental of late. Sounds like you may have been a victim of one of its transitory tantrums. We're giving it an upgrade a little later this month which should see it stop it's occasional hoaxing of customers. @AMP: Your serial key didn't come in a retail box bundled with AVG by any chance did it?

That sounds like version 5.30 or earlier. Versions of CCleaner prior to 5.35 would have stopped working on Windows 10 in April 2019. One of the reasons for the regular (~monthly) CCleaner updates is to ensure compatibility with the constantly-updated software packages that it is designed to clean. We strongly recommend staying up to date with the latest version (version 5.62, at the time of writing)

@piecevcake: Do you have the same problem with the new 5.62 version?

@AMP: I couldn't find a serial key registered to the same email address that you used to register for the forums. I am assuming that you purchased the serial key online from CCleaner via our Cleverbridge ecommerce partner rather than some other reseller, and using a different email address? Has the problem already resolved itself? If not, have you contacted customer support at support@ccleaner.com? They are the experts at resolving licence key problems. @Jaguar: You have a new licence key ending with WYMF that expires in August 2020 but you also have an old licence key that ends with UYMF that does indeed expire in October 2019. When you go to Options > About > License Information inside the CCleaner console, does it show the old WYMF key or the new UYMF key? If it shows the old one, then pasting in the new one (and the name from your order confirmation) should solve your problem. If it does show the new one and you are still getting expiration messages then please contact customer support at support@ccleaner.com to get that cleaned up for you (specifying also if it is email, or in-product messages that are mentioning your expiry) @KDG: Confirming that you have a new licence key ending with U4YF that expires in September 2021. But you also have some old expired serial keys as well. When you go to Options > About > License Information inside the CCleaner console, does it show the new U4YF key with your new expiry date? If it shows one of your old expired ones, then pasting in the new one (and the name from your order confirmation) should solve your problem. If it does show the new one and you are still getting expiration messages then please contact customer support at support@ccleaner.com to get that cleaned up for you (specifying also if it is email, or in-product messages that are mentioning your expiry) @Songan: To confirm, your serial key beginning with C2Z5 does not expire until 30 June 2020. I note that your serial key is one of those ones that are tricky to type in ("2"s looks like "Z"s, "I"s look like "1"s, etc) so did you copy-paste in your serial or manually type it when you registered? When you go to Options > About > License Information inside the CCleaner console, what information do you see about expiry dates and validity?

@Marcello Gianola: I can't see any new purchases in the customer database recorded against the email address that you used to register - just your old key (the one start starts with CF47) that expires in December of this year. Might you have ordered under a different email address? Have you got an order number from Cleverbridge? Don't post any personal information here, but if you contact support@ccleaner.com with as much information as you can provide, they can try to find your order for you in the system.

Defraggler generally recommends using its "Optimize" function rather than "Defrag" on SSDs.

@Bawat, @Nesledyret: In both cases the problem seems to be related to older versions of CCleaner. Does an update to 5.62 solve the problem for you?

... an update on this, the auto-routing of XP users to the slim build will be released next week. The issue with Windows XP for CCleaner 5.61 and 5.62 is only with the full installer

@Dachstein: just checking, where did you get your 5.62 full installer from? There is supposed to be OS detection on the standard download page to automagically redirect XP users to the Slim build

Looks like that link leaked out on twitter before launch. In the meantime, I asked the team to check and the primary build looks fine in Russian:

Just checking ... where did you download this from? We don't officially release until later today ...

Indeed. That was the CCleaner update process jamming in an issue that was specific to the old CCleaner 5.44 (about 18 version ago). And also a reason for asking for the Task Manager dump screenshot - amongst other things it can provide an indication as to whether it is CCleaner itself causing the problem for you or if there is an ancillary service which is having problems.

Odd. Not sure if this is us or not, but I'd like to get it checked out nevertheless. Did that appear in the middle of your screen or in the lower left corner? Was it on top of the CCleaner window or by itself on your desktop? Also can I check your Windows version, CCleaner version (before you updated) and your default browser please?