CCleaner works great, but I was using it not long back & it caused me to lose thumbnail view on windows explorer for pictures. I am running XP Pro, P4 3,200 MHZ dual core with 1 GB ram & 128 MB intel video accel.
It was working fine, but after running ccleaner registry cleaner, I noticed I was unable to view thumbnails. I was able to restore it back, but what caused it is this:
CCleaner Registry Scanner, when you have it checked to scan for Unused File Extensions will scan for those no longer being used or necessary. The problem with this, is if you install another program that becomes the default for viewing .JPG files, then when it is removed, it may not re-associate default windows image viewer back to .JPG.
This causes a severe problem, because CCleaner then sees it as "not being used" so that it is safe to remove. There either needs to be a whitelist of extensions that will never be removed because they are critical, or this section of registry cleaning needs to be skipped altogether.
It does a good job, generally, but this is one of the most dangerous keys to mess with that CCleaner Registry Cleaner cleans. I have had problems before with this, as others I know have too. I would like to see this fixed in future versions, because there are just too many things that can go wrong with cleaning this key, & many times you don't really realize what just happened till later. There are some who claimed that CCleaner caused them to not be able to use .EXE files after doing a reg cleaning.
I am not sure on that, but I am pretty sure that if they did, it would have to have occurred because of the scan for "Unused File Extensions".
Since this is an area that is so difficult for software to really tell if it is needed or not, can I beg the authors to please remove this section of cleaning? It is just dangerous! 98% of problems that I have found with people cleaning their registry with CCleaner has come from the top 3 checkmark boxes, & of those, 85% or more have been from the file extension checkmark box alone.
Anyone else agree with me that it should be removed since it causes more harm than good to scan for "unused" file extensions?
Thanks!