srdiamond

The point about the data being included in the key has been known for some time, I think. The only possible question is whether changing the behavior in the manner you suggest is practicable. Could a third party application read and recreate the data in question while deleting the key? I have no idea. Do you _know_? If the practicability can be confirmed, the question is, why hasn't it been done. Is it the result of hostility to Microsoft, a belief that the developer shouldn't have to perform extra work because of Microsoft programming the developer thinks is irrational? The reason for not correcting or prominently warning of the problem is most important. If the developer is failing to treat MS applications properly out of prejudice, users cannot assume that other issues won't arise.

I wasn't the only person irritated by this. In the thread above, I notice you wrote: "It isn't an issue of MS Office versus OpenOffice.org it's clearly a CCleaner issue that's been an issue for many long months of wiping out some MS Office settings which in my views those entries that remove the user settings for Word, etc., should be removed from CCleaner, the last time I checked my preferred Word, etc., settings weren't junk. To be blunt and to the point it pissed me off when I found out that CCleaner was the reason I had to constantly reconfigure Word 2003, hence the reason I disabled Office 2003 cleaning." I assume you receive further information subsequently, but I don't think the developer has done all that he reasonably should to prevent such problems from arising. If some people want or need such thorough cleaning that their settings have to be sacrificed in the process, I'm glad CCleaner provides this capability for them. But it isn't a behavior the user has any reason to expect. There must be a mechanism to bring the behavior to the user's attention before the effect is felt. One obvious way would be to turn Office cleaning OFF by default and pop-up a warning when the user checks Office. I still don't understand why the product cannot be programmed to distinguish settings from junk, but I tentatively assume there must be good reason for this. I also don't understand why CCleaner deletes a Word registry key when registry cleaning is turned of, only the temp remover is run, and the product indicates nothing was removed, and it seems this must be a serious bug. At this point, the developer's irresponsible marketing of the product has destroyed the confidence in a product I need to allow it access to my registry, and I have deleted CCleaner.

Amazing. I am expected to do a forum search to discover that a product widely promoted on the net has a bug that hasn't been resolved for over 1 1/2 years. Misleading promotion, if you ask me. Eventually consumers will wise up to the fact that a free product is no excuse for incompetent programming. No product is free; surely the developer obtains benefits from promoting his product, and owes a duty of informed consent to users.

Such a problem has been reported with regard to registry cleaners in Microsoft forums . The odd thing here is that using only the temp cleaner and trash emptier alone--even when the temp cleaner says it deleted 0 bytes--resets Word 2003 setting to default. The pattern of affected setting make it clear it is deleting either the data key or the Settings value from the data key. If this serious bug has not been previously reported, it is probably because many users either don't reset Word settings from default or don't recognize the difference after resetting. Latest version of CCleaner